Were we as eloquent as angels, we should please some men, some women, and some children, much more by listening than by talking. 3259 LITERATURE -see Bible, The, Taste. Colton: Lacon. The finer essences of life find choicest expression in letters. 3260 A. Bronson Alcott: Table Talk. I. Learning. Letters. Writing is not literature unless it gives to the reader a pleasure which arises not only from the things said, but from the way in which they are said; and that pleasure is only given when the words are carefully or curiously or beautifully put together into sentences. 3261 Stopford Brooke: Primer of English Literature. Literature is the thought of thinking souls. 3262 Carlyle Essays. Memoirs of the Life of Scott. (London and Westminster Review, Nos. xii. and lv., 1838.) There is, first, the literature of knowledge, and secondly, the literature of power. The function of the first is to teach, the function of the second is to move; the first is a rudder, the second an oar or a sail. The first speaks to the mere discursive understanding, the second speaks ultimately, it may happen, to the higher understanding or reason, but always through affections of pleasure and sympathy. 3263 Thomas De Quincey: Essays on the Poets. I may say of our literature that it has one characteristic which distinguishes it from almost all the other literatures of modern Europe, and that is its exuberant reproductiveDisraeli (Earl of Beaconsfield): Speech, May 6, 1868. Royal Literary Fund Dinner. ness. 3264 Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough of literature. 3265 Emerson: Letters and Social Aims. Quotation and Originality. Literature, taken in all its bearings, forms the grand line of demarcation between the human and the animal kingdoms. 3266 William Godwin: The Enquirer. Of an Early Taste for Reading. Literature, like nobility, runs in the blood. 3267 Hazlitt: Table Talk. Second Series. Pt. ii. Essay xxiv. On the Aristocracy of Letters. Literary history is the great morgue where all seek the dead ones whom they love, or to whom they are related. 3268 Heine: Scintillations. Excerpts. Art, Literature, Criticism. Literature, like a gypsy, to be picturesque, should be a little ragged. 3269 Douglas Jerrold: Specimens of Jerrold's Wit. No literature is complete until the language in which it is written is dead. 3270 Longfellow: Kavanagh. Ch. 30. Literature, properly so called, draws its sap from the deep soil of human nature's common and everlasting sympathies, the gathered leaf-mould of countless generations (in лro pråkor yerin), and not from any top-dressing capriciously scattered over the surface at some master's bidding. 3271 Lowell: Among My Books. Spenser. The riches of scholarship, the benignities of literature, defy fortune and outlive calamity. They are beyond the reach of thief or moth or rust. As they cannot be inherited, so they cannot be alienated. 3272 Lowell Address, Chelsea, Mass., Dec. 22, 1885. A nation's literature is always the biography of its humanity. 3273 Robert Lord Lytton: Speeches of Edward Lord Literature is, no doubt, a fine art, the finest of the arts; but it is also a practical art, and it is deplorable to think how much stout, instructive work might and ought to be done by people who, in dreaming of ideas in prose and verse beyond their attainment, end, like the poor Casaubon of fiction, in a little pamphlet on a particle, or else in mediocre poetry, or else in nothing. 3274 John Morley: Critical Miscellanies. Harriet The history of literature is the history of the human mind. It is, as compared with other histories, the intellectual as distinguished from the material, the informing spirit as compared with the outward and visible. 3275 William H. Prescott: Biographical and Critical Miscellanies. Chateaubriand's English Literature. The essay should be pure literature as the poem is pure literature. 3276 Alexander Smith: Dreamthorp. On the Writing of Essays. We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal. 3277 Sydney Smith: A Memoir of the Rev. Sydney Smith, by Lady Holland. Ch. 2. Literature is the daughter of heaven, who has descended upon earth to soften and charm all human ills. 3278 Bernardin St. Pierre: Paul and Virginia. It is the life in literature that acts upon life. Timothy Titcomb (J. G. Holland): Gold-Foil. Literature becomes free institutions. It is the graceful ornament of civil liberty, and a happy restraint on the asperities which political controversies sometimes occasion. 3280 Daniel Webster: Discourse, Plymouth, Dec. 22, 1820. First Settlement of New England. LONDON. London is the epitome of our times, and the Rome of to-day. 3281 Emerson English Traits. Result. LONELINESS. The best loneliness is when no human eye has rested on our face for a whole day. 3282 Auerbach: On the Heights. (Bennett, Translator.) LOSS. No man can lose what he never had. 3283 Izaak Walton: The Complete Angler. Pt. i. Ch. 5. LOVE- -see Amiability, Character, Companionship, 3284 V. Habits. The more a man loves, the more he suffers. The sum of possible grief for each soul is in proportion to its degree of perfection. 3285 Amiel: Journal. Dec. 26, 1868. (Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Translator.) True love is that which ennobles the personality, fortifies the heart, and sanctifies the existence. And the being we love must not be mysterious and sphinx-like, but clear and iimpid as a diamond; so that admiration and attachment may grow with knowledge. 3286 Amiel: Journal. Dec. 28, 1880. (Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Translator.) Love cannot endure indifference. It needs to be wanted. Like a lamp, it needs to be fed out of the oil of another's heart, or its flame burns low. Pulpit. Love is more just than justice. 3289 Henry Ward Beecher: Proverbs from Plymouth Love is ownership. 3290 Henry Ward Beecher: Life Thoughts. Love is the medicine of all moral evil. By it the world is to be cured of sin. 3291 Henry Ward Beecher: Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. Love is the river of life in this world. Think not that ye know it who stand at the little tinkling rill, the first small fountain. Not until you have gone through the rocky gorges, and not lost the stream; not until you have gone through the meadow, and the stream has widened and deepened until fleets could ride on its bosom; not until beyond the meadow you have come to the unfathomable ocean, and poured your treasures into its depths, -not until then can you know what love is. 3292 Henry Ward Beecher: Sermons. Plymouth Pulpit. Second Series. The Right and the Wrong Way of Giving Pleasure. Love is the wine of existence. 3293 Henry Ward Beecher: Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. No man can afford to invest his being in anything lower than faith, hope, love, these three, the greatest of which is love. 3294 Henry Ward Beecher: Proverbs from Plymouth Love is ever the beginning of knowledge. 3295 Carlyle: Essays. Death of Goethe. (New Monthly Magazine, No. cxxxviii., 1832.) He who loves so far serves. 3296 William Ellery Channing: Note-Book. Love. Love is the life of the soul. It is the harmony of the universe. 3297 William Ellery Channing: Note-Book. Love. Love is the parent of thought. 3298 William Ellery Channing: Note-Book. Love. Love will ever play a great part in human life to the end of time. It will be an immense element in its happiness, perhaps a still greater one in its sorrows, its disasters, its tragedies. It is still an immense power in shaping and coloring it, both in fiction and in reality; in the family, in the romance, in the fatalities and the prosaic ruin of vulgar fact. 3299 R. W. Church: Edmund Spenser. Ch. 5. (English Men of Letters.) Love, like death, a universal leveller of mankind. 3300 Congreve: The Double-Dealer. Act ii. Sc. 8. Words are the weak support of cold indifference; love has no language to be heard. 3301 Congreve: The Double-Dealer. Act iv. Sc. 17. Men love at first, and most warmly; women love last and longest. This is natural enough, for nature makes women to be won, and men to win. Men are the active, positive force, and therefore they are more ardent and demonstrative. 3302 George William Curtis: Prue and I. VII. Our Cousin, the Curate. Love, however, must not (as often imagined) pass for the sole emotion which evinces heart. 3303 George Darley: Works of Beaumont and Fletcher. Introduction. We are all born for love. It is the principle of existence and its only end. 3304 Disraeli (Earl of Beaconsfield): Sybil. Bk. v. Ch. 4. Our love is in wrought in our enthusiasm as electricity is in wrought in the air, exalting its power by a subtle presence. 3305 George Eliot: Adam Bede. Ch. 33. Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth of man. 3306 Emerson Essays. Of Friendship. Perhaps love is only the highest symbol of friendship, as all other things seem symbols of love. 3307 Emerson: Society and Solitude. Domestic Life. Let no man think he is loved by any man when he loves no man. 3308 Epictetus: Fragments. CLVI. (Long, Trans.) I will take heed both of a speedy friend and a slow enemy. Love is never lasting which flames before it burns; and hate, like wetted coals, throws a fiercer heat when fire gets the mastery. As quick wits have seldom sound judgments, which should make them continue, so friendship kindled suddenly is rarely found to consist with the durability of affection. Enduring love is ever built on virtue, which no man can see |