Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the ...surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a sort of myth of History that philosophers have.... History for philosophers is some sort of great, vast continuity in w...hich the freedom of individuals and economic or social determinations come and get entangled. When someone lays a finger on one of those great themes--continuity, the effective exercise of human liberty, how individual liberty is articulated with social determinations--when someone touches one of these three myths, these good people start crying out that History is being raped or murdered.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We cannot escape the impression that the Muse has stooped a little in her flight, when we come to the literature of civilized eras....... The bard has in a great measure lost the dignity and sacredness of his office. Formerly he was called a seer, but now it is thought that one man sees as much as another. He has no longer the bardic rage, and only conceives the deed, which he formerly stood ready to perform. Hosts of warriors earnest for battle could not mistake nor dispense with the ancient bard. His lays were heard in the pauses of the fight. There was no danger of his being overlooked by his contemporaries. But now the hero and the bard are of different professions. When we come to the pleasant English verse, the storms have all cleared away, and it will never thunder and lighten more. The poet has come within doors, and exchanged the forest and crag for the fireside, the hut of the Gael, and Stonehenge, with its circles of stones, for the house of the Englishman. No hero stands at the door prepared to break forth into song or heroic action, but a homely Englishman, who cultivates the art of poetry. We see the comfortable fireside, and hear the crackling fagots, all in verse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
His life itself passes deeper in nature than the studies of the naturalist penetrate; himself a subject for the naturalist. The la...tter raises the moss and bark gently with his knife in search of insects; the former lays open logs to their core with his axe, and moss and bark fly far and wide. He gets his living by barking trees. Such a man has some right to fish, and I love to see nature carried out in him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While yet it is cold January, and snow and ice are thick and solid, the prudent landlord comes from the village to get ice to cool... his summer drink; impressively, even pathetically, wise, to foresee the heat and thirst of July now in January,--wearing a thick coat and mittens! when so many things are not provided for. It may be that he lays up no treasures in this world which will cool his summer drink in the next.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Technological change defines the horizon of our material world as it shapes the limiting conditions of what is possible and what i...s barely imaginable. It erodes ... assumptions about the nature of our reality, the "pattern" in which we dwell, and lays open new choices.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let me see, what am I to buy for our sheep-shearing feast? Three pound of sugar, five pound of currants, rice--what will this sist...er of mine do with rice? But my father hath made her mistress of the feast, and she lays it on.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the ...world, no species of composition has been so much decried.... "And what are you reading, Miss--?" "Oh! it is only a novel!" replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. "It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda"; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I press not to the quire, nor dare I greet The holy place with my unhallowed feet;... My unwashed Muse pollutes not things divine, Nor mingles her profaner notes with thine; Here humbly at the porch she listening stays, And with glad ears sucks in thy sacred lays.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »