Historical Essays

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Macmillan and Company, 1873 - History - 387 pages

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Page 313 - From the still glassy lake that sleeps Beneath Aricia's trees — Those trees in whose dim shadow The ghastly priest doth reign, The priest who slew the slayer, And shall himself be slain...
Page 207 - LECTURES ON ANCIENT HISTORY, FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE TAKING OF ALEXANDRIA BY OCTAYIANUS, CONTAINING The History of the Asiatic Nations, the Egyptians, Greeks, Macedonians, and Carthaginians, BY BG NIEBUHR.
Page 93 - Egypt which drowns the spirit in effeminate indifference ; rather they are like the <f>dp/j,a/cov e<rd\6v, the remedial specific, which, freshening the understanding by contact with the truth and strength of nature, should both improve its vigilance against deceit and danger, and increase its vigour and resolution for the discharge of duty.
Page 53 - What strikes one more than anything else throughout Mr. Gladstone's volumes is the intense earnestness, the loftiness of moral purpose, which breathes in every page. He has not taken up Homer as a plaything, nor even as a mere literary enjoyment. To him the study of the Prince of Poets is clearly a means by which himself and other men may be made wiser and better.
Page 73 - All this is evidently heartfelt, and it almost deserves the name of eloquence ; yet it is to us simply unintelligible. Mr. Gladstone, by way of reverence for certain writings, actually goes out of his way to disparage them. Why cannot...
Page 73 - ... such a degree, indeed, that the rank and quality of the religious frame may in general be tested, at least negatively, by the height of its relish for them. There is the whole music of the human heart, when touched by the hand of the Maker, in all its tones that whisper or that swell, for every hope and fear, for every joy and pang, for every form of strength and languor, of disquietude and rest.
Page 308 - We may correct and improve from the stores which have been opened since Gibbon's time ; we may write again large parts of his story from other and often truer and more wholesome points of view, but the work of Gibbon as a whole, as the encyclopaedic history of...
Page 73 - If, however, we ought to decline to try the Judaic code by its merely political merits, much more ought we to apply the same principle to the sublimity of the prophecies, and to the deep spiritual experiences of the Psalms. In the first, we have a voice speaking from God, with the marks that it is of God so visibly imprinted upon it, that the mind utterly refuses to place the prophetical books in the scale against any production of human genius. And all that is peculiar in our conception of Isaiah,...

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