De Quincey's Works: Essays sceptical and anti-sceptical on problems neglected or mis-conceived

Forsideomslag
J. Hogg, 1858

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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 64 - Essay on Man.' On the first, which (with Dr. Johnson's leave) is the feeblest and least interesting of Pope's writings, being substantially a mere versification, like a metrical multiplication- table, of commonplaces the most mouldy with which criticism has baited its rat-traps ; since nothing is said worth answering, it is sufficient to answer nothing.
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 132 - Certainly not ; but that is far too little. It is an obligation resting upon the Bible, if it is to be consistent with itself, that it should refuse to teach science ; and, if the Bible ever had taught any one art, science, or process of life, capital doubts would have clouded our confidence in the authority of the book. By what caprice, it would have been asked, is a divine mission abandoned suddenly for a human mission ? By what caprice is this one science taught, and others not ? Or these two,...
Side 16 - ... 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 his eyes in this world, —...
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 315 - This he often spoke of as the great blot — the ineffaceable transgression of his life. For this he mourned in penitential words yet on record. To this he traced back the calamity of his latter life. Lord Strafford's memorable words, " Put not your trust in princes, nor in the sons of princes,
Side 6 - ... coffee-house he sometimes divided his evenings. Singing, it seems, he could hear in spite of his deafness. In this street I took my final leave of him ; it turned out such ; and anticipating at the time that it would be so, I looked after his white hat at the moment it was disappearing, and exclaimed — "Farewell, thou half-crazy and most eloquent man ! I shall never see thy face again.
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 3 - English character will be found to terminate : and his opinion is especially valuable — first and chiefly, because he was a philosopher ; secondly, because his acquaintance with man civilized and uncivilized, under all national distinctions, was absolutely unrivalled. Meantime, this and others of his opinions were expressed in language that if literally construed would often appear insane or absurd. The truth is, his long intercourse with foreign nations had given something of a hybrid tincture...

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