If melodrama is the quintessence of drama, farce is the quintessence of theatre. Melodrama is written. A moving image of the world... is provided by a writer. Farce is acted. The writer's contribution seems not only absorbed but translated.... One cannot imagine melodrama being improvised. The improvised drama was pre-eminently farce.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is unjust that Italy should claim musical pre-eminence, even forcing Italian on music as its international language, when Italy...'s genius is so visual. No nation can build towns as beautiful nor claim a better right to regard nature as a shapeless substance to be redeemed by urbifaction. The Italians are not Wordsworthian. Man fulfils himself in the town. There is too much wild nature in music, and it has to be tamed into simple four-square patterns, as in Verdi and Bellini. The tenor does not proclaim Byronically to the woods and hills: he is a kind of sexy politician for the town piazza. The Italians would listen to Aaron, but not to Moses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No people require maxims so much as the American. The reason is obvious: the country is so vast, the people always going somewhere..., from Oregon apple valley to boreal New England, that we do not know whether to be temperate orchards or sterile climate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over... the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... he held it one of the prettiest attitudes of the feminine mind to adore a man's pre- eminence without too precise a knowledge ...of what it consisted in.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Be studious in your profession, and you will be learned. Be industrious and frugal, and you will be rich. Be sober and temperate, ...and you will be healthy. Be in general virtuous, and you will be happy. At least you will, by such conduct, stand the best chance for such consequences.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this wh...en I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Disunion and civil war are at hand; and yet I fear disunion and war less than compromise. We can recover from them. The free State...s alone, if we must go on alone, will make a glorious nation. Twenty millions in the temperate zone, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, full of vigor, industry, inventive genius, educated, and moral; increasing by immigration rapidly, and, above all, free--all free--will form a confederacy of twenty States scarcely inferior in real power to the unfortunate Union of thirty-three States which we had on the first of November.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »