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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Chapter 19: personal traits. (search)
. I can only console myself for these semblances of actions by seeing that others seem to be in some degree aided by them. But oh! really to feel the glow of action, without its weariness, what heaven it must be! Ms. Again she writes to the same friend, contrasting the meditative life of Socrates and the active life of Jesus Christ:-- Cambridge, June 17, 1842. In my quiet retreat I read Xenophon and became more acquainted with his Socrates. I had before known only the Socrates of Plato, one much more to my mind. Socrates took the ground that you approve; he conformed to the Greek Church, and it is evident with a sincere reverence, because it was the growth of the national mind. He thought best to stand on its platform, and illustrate, though with keen truth, by received forms: this was his right way, for his influence was naturally private, for individuals who could, in some degree, respond to the teachings of his demon; it made no difference to him; he knew the multi
C. Edwards Lester, Life and public services of Charles Sumner: Born Jan. 6, 1811. Died March 11, 1874., Section Fifth: Senatorial career. (search)
are individuals who do not exert the wickedness of the law. The law still endures. Slavery, which it defines and upholds, continues to outrage Public Opinion, and, within the limits of our Republic, upwards of three millions of human beings, guilty only of a skin not colored like your own, are left the victims of its unrighteous, irresponsible power. Power divorced from right is devilish; power without the check of responsibility is tyrannical; and I need not go back to the authority of Plato, when I assert that the most complete injustice is that which is erected into the form of law. But all these things concur in Slavery. It is, then, on the testimony of slave-masters, solemnly, legislatively, judicially attested in the very law itself, that I now arraign this institution as an outrage upon man and his Creator. And here is the necessity of the Anti-Slavery Enterprise. A wrong so transcendent, so loathsome, so direful, must be encountered wherever it can be reached, and the
C. Edwards Lester, Life and public services of Charles Sumner: Born Jan. 6, 1811. Died March 11, 1874., Xxvii. (search)
are individuals who do not exert the wickedness of the law. The law still endures. Slavery, which it defines and upholds, continues to outrage Public Opinion, and, within the limits of our Republic, upwards of three millions of human beings, guilty only of a skin not colored like your own, are left the victims of its unrighteous, irresponsible power. Power divorced from right is devilish; power without the check of responsibility is tyrannical; and I need not go back to the authority of Plato, when I assert that the most complete injustice is that which is erected into the form of law. But all these things concur in Slavery. It is, then, on the testimony of slave-masters, solemnly, legislatively, judicially attested in the very law itself, that I now arraign this institution as an outrage upon man and his Creator. And here is the necessity of the Anti-Slavery Enterprise. A wrong so transcendent, so loathsome, so direful, must be encountered wherever it can be reached, and the
C. Edwards Lester, Life and public services of Charles Sumner: Born Jan. 6, 1811. Died March 11, 1874., Section Eighth: the war of the Rebellion. (search)
field for its use and development. The Creator had looked on us benignantly, as our fathers sailed for a new home beyond the sea to find a resting-place for earth's children. Thus high did Heaven seem to fix its purpose on North America,—thus sublimely did our founders comprehend the fact. Iii. Our history had been more wonderful than the dreams of Oriental fancy. All the images of wealth, prosperity, and power that had ever thrilled the brain-pulses of the most ideal disciple of Plato, vanished into thin air before the form of Young American Liberty, rising from this fresh continent, proclaiming to the race freedom, order, and happiness for all. No such treasure had before been committed to men. When He spread this festival, He asked all nations to come. Hardly a day went by, but some winged messenger came from the Old World, freighted with hearts that were weary, seeking a new roof-tree,—with muscles that were over-strained by the unpaid toil of Europe; but all ready to
C. Edwards Lester, Life and public services of Charles Sumner: Born Jan. 6, 1811. Died March 11, 1874., Iii. (search)
Iii. Our history had been more wonderful than the dreams of Oriental fancy. All the images of wealth, prosperity, and power that had ever thrilled the brain-pulses of the most ideal disciple of Plato, vanished into thin air before the form of Young American Liberty, rising from this fresh continent, proclaiming to the race freedom, order, and happiness for all. No such treasure had before been committed to men. When He spread this festival, He asked all nations to come. Hardly a day went by, but some winged messenger came from the Old World, freighted with hearts that were weary, seeking a new roof-tree,—with muscles that were over-strained by the unpaid toil of Europe; but all ready to carry out the dreams of personal, manly, ennobling social life. The best minds and the warmest hearts on the other side of the water understood America. They knew our history, and they burned with enthusiasm to mix their fortunes up with our earlier settlers. They did; and even this tide
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 1, Colonial and Revolutionary Literature: Early National Literature: Part I (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.), Chapter 1: travellers and observers, 1763-1846 (search)
underestimate the element of truth in the narrative, and Carver's share in its production. Carver was not too uneducated to make notes and gather materials for a book. He could write a long coherent letter to his first wife, and specimens of his writing are not in the hand of an ignorant man. He, not less than his assistant or assistants in publication, could have met with the works of Charlevoix, Adair, and Lahontan in London book-stalls. But it was hardly his pen that made reference to Plato and Grotius. The volume is dedicated To Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society. Then follows, in the second edition, a magniloquent Address to the Public. The journal proper occupies but a third of the volume. Next come seventeen chapters on the origin, physique, and dress of the Indians, their manners and customs, their government, their food, dances, methods of warfare and games, and their language. The eighteenth deals with animals, birds-as, for example, the Whipperwill, or
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 1, Colonial and Revolutionary Literature: Early National Literature: Part I (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.), Chapter 8: transcendentalism (search)
ghbours up, we feel that here is the homely New England version of Shelley's cry to the West Wind: Be through my lips to unawakened earth The trumpet of a prophecy! When Thoreau, on another occasion, writes that he was not aware that the capacity to hear the woodpecker had slumbered within me so long, the words have all the spontaneity of underived utterance, and yet who can deny that the peculiar turn of that expression goes back through German or we know not what other channels to Plato and still remoter Eastern sources? This mention of the East is suggestive of all the weaknesses of transcendentalism: its tendency to neglect proximate and to refer everything to primal causes; its attempt to attain the spiritual not by subduing but by turning its back on the material; its proneness to substitute passivity and receptiveness for alertness and creative force; its traces of a paralysing pantheism and fatalism; its ineffectualness; its atrophy of will. More than a touch of e
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 1, Colonial and Revolutionary Literature: Early National Literature: Part I (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.), Chapter 9: Emerson (search)
year at college and contains notes for a prize dissertation on the Character of Socrates. Among the sentences is this: What is God? said the disciples, and Plato replied, It is hard to learn and impossible to divulge. And the last page of the record, in the twelfth volume, repeats what is really the same thought: The ces jostled together like so many mutually repellent particles; but because from the manner of his composition Emerson often missed what he might have learned from Plato's Phaedrus was the essence of good rhetoric, that is to say, the consciousness of his hearer's mind as well as of his own. We hear him, as it were, talking to himsiographers has attempted to set forth this philosophy as a synthesis and an anticipation. It is a synthesis because in it we find, as Emerson had already found in Plato and Plotinus, a reconciliation of the many and the one, the everlasting flux and the motionless calm at the heart of things: An ample and generous recognitio
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 1, Colonial and Revolutionary Literature: Early National Literature: Part I (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.), Index. (search)
mbus, 181 Pierre, 323 Pierrepont, Sarah, 58 Pietas et Gratulatio, etc., 168 Pike, Albert, 319 Pilot, the, 297, 300 Pinkerton, John, 205 Pioneer, consisting of essays, literary, moral and theological, the, 234 n. Pioneers, the, 208, 293, 296, 297, 298, 299 Pirate, the, 297 Pizarro, 287 Placide, Henry, 221, 227 Plain man's Path-way to Heaven, The, 116 Plan of a proposed union between great Britain and the colonies, 138 Planting of the Apple Tree, the, 271 Plato, 193, 352, 360 Players of a century, 231 n. Pleasures of the imagination, 165 Plotinus, 266, 360 Plutarch, 93 Pocahontas, 17 Pocahontas, 225 Pocahontas or the settlers of Virginia, 221, 225 Poe, Edgar Allan, 181, 261, 266, 273, 275, 280, 313, 324 Poems (Bryant), 260 n., 269 n., 270 n., 271 n. Poems (Halleck), 283 Poems of Arouet, 178 Poems, dramatic and miscellaneous (Mercy Warren), 179 Poem on the happiness of America, 169 Poems by several hands (17
Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 1, Woman's rights. (search)
at only because he was not born a noble, and on of those levellers who are willing to level only down to themselves. 5. Resolved, That while political and natural justice accord civil equality to woman; while great thinkers of every age, from Plato to Condorcet and Mill, have supported their claim; while voluntary associations, religious and secular, have been organized on this basis,there is yet a favorite argument against it, that no political community or nation ever existed in which womex, as they call themselves; a tacit confession of risk to this imagined superiority, if they consent to meet their sisters in the lecture-hall or the laboratory of science. My proof of it is this: that the mightiest intellects of the race, from Plato down to the present time, some of the rarest minds of Germany, France, and England, have successively yielded their assent to the fact that woman is, not perhaps identically, but equally, endowed with man in all intellectual capabilities. It is
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