The Works of Thomas De Quincey: Protestantism, and other essays

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A. & C. Black, 1863

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Side 44 - Travels," a production so new and strange, that it filled the reader with a mingled emotion of merriment and amazement. It was received with such avidity, that the price of the first edition was raised before the second could be made; it was read by the high and the low, the learned and illiterate. Criticism was for a while lost in wonder; no rules of judgment were applied to a book written in open defiance of truth and regularity.
Side 17 - Paris shaken by the fierce torments of revolutionary convulsions, the silence of Lapland, and the solitary forests of Canada, with the swarming life of the torrid zone, together with innumerable recollections of individual joy and sorrow, that he had participated by sympathy — lay like a map beneath him, as if eternally co-present to his view; so that, in the contemplation of the prodigious whole, he had no leisure to separate the parts, or occupy his mind with details. Hence came the monotony...
Side 133 - ... would have .followed. It is clear as is the purpose of daylight, that the whole body of the arts and sciences composes one vast machinery for the irritation and development of the human intellect. For this end they exist. To see God, therefore, descending into the arena of science, and contending, as it were, for his own prizes, by teaching science in the Bible, would be to see him intercepting from their self-evident destination (viz., man's intellectual benefit) his own problems by solving...
Side 16 - ... tribes, he had never met with any so ferocious and brutal as to attack an unarmed and defenceless man who was able to make them understand that he threw himself upon their hospitality and forbearance. On the whole, Walking Stewart was a sublime visionary : he had seen and suffered much amongst men ; yet not too much, or so as to dull the genial tone of his sympathy with the sufferings of others. His mind was a mirror of the sentient universe. — The whole mighty vision that had fleeted before...
Side 1 - ... Stewart was in Bath — where my family at that time resided. He frequented the pump-room, and I believe all public places — walking up and down, and dispersing his philosophic opinions to the right and the left, like a Grecian philosopher. The first time I saw him was at a concert in the Upper Rooms ; he was pointed out to me by one of my party as a very eccentric man who had walked over the habitable globe.
Side 49 - And what wonder should there be in this, when the main qualification for such a style was plain good sense, natural feeling, unpretendingness, some little scholarly practice in putting together the clockwork of sentences, so as to avoid mechanical awkwardness of construction, but above all the advantage of a subject, such in its nature as instinctively to reject ornament, lest it should draw off attention from itself ? Such subjects are common ; but grand impassioned subjects insist upon a different...
Side 64 - A false abstract is given, or a false impression, of any one amongst his brilliant works that is noticed at all ; and a false sneer, a sneer irrelevant to the case, at any work dismissed by name as unworthy of notice. The three works selected as the gems of Pope's collection are the " Essay on Criticism," the " Rape of the Lock," and the
Side 298 - Let us take out our allowance.'' Casuistry, therefore, justly, and without infringing any truth of Christianity, urges the care of health as the basis of all moral action, because, in fact, of all perfectly voluntary action. Every impulse of bad health jars or untunes some string in the fine harp of human volition ; and because a man cannot be a moral being but in the proportion of his free action, therefore it is clear that no man can be in a high sense moral, except in so far as through health...
Side 48 - Rotherhithe verisimilitude. All men grow dull, and ought to be dull, that live under a solemn sense of eternal danger, one inch only of plank (often worm-eaten) between themselves and the grave ; and, also, that see for ever one wilderness of waters — sublime, but (like the wilderness on shore) monotonous.
Side 10 - In the next page, he determines that he has, with the exception of one truth — viz., "the latent energy, physical and moral, of human nature as existing in the British people.

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