Letters and Letter Writing as Means to the Study and Practice of English Compositon

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Bobbs-Merrill, 1903 - Letter writing - 226 pages

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Page 99 - Dear Madam: I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle.
Page 44 - I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead Nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street; the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden; the...
Page 152 - Thus he dwells in all, From life's minute beginnings, up at last To man — the consummation of this scheme Of being, the completion of this sphere Of life : whose attributes had here and there Been scattered o'er the visible world before, Asking to be combined, dim fragments meant To be united in some wondrous whole...
Page 63 - I have been lately informed by the proprietor of ' The World,' that two papers, in which my ' Dictionary ' is recommended to the public, were written by your lordship. To be so distinguished, is an honour, which, being very little accustomed to favours from the great, I know not well how to receive, or in what terms to acknowledge. " When, upon some slight encouragement, I first visited your lordship, I was overpowered, like the rest of mankind, by...
Page 63 - Is not a patron, My Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help?
Page 64 - I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the public should consider me as owing that to a Patron, which Providence has enabled me to do for myself.
Page 23 - ... lived in a shoe and had so many children she didn't know what to do," or that Jack climbed the beanstalk and found the giant who lived at the top of it.
Page 45 - Strand from fulness of joy at so much life. All these emotions must be strange to you; so are your rural emotions to me. But consider, what must I have been doing all my life not to have lent great portions of my heart with usury to such scenes ? My attachments are all local, purely local.
Page 46 - Your sun, and moon, and skies, and hills, and lakes, affect me no more, or scarcely come to me in more venerable characters, than as a gilded room with tapestry and tapers, where I might live with handsome visible objects. I consider the clouds above me but as a roof beautifully painted, but unable to satisfy the mind : and at last, like the pictures of the apartment of a connoisseur, unable to afford him any longer a pleasure. So fading upon me, from disuse, have been the beauties of Nature, as...
Page 152 - Like chrysalids impatient for the air, The shining dorrs are busy, beetles run Along the furrows; ants make their ado; Above, birds fly in merry flocks, the lark Soars up and up, shivering for very joy; Afar the ocean sleeps; white fishing-gulls Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe Of nested limpets; savage creatures seek Their loves in wood and plain — and God renews His ancient rapture.

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