Word: genius
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Dates: during 1890-1899
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...true of such as bring about enduring political changes. So during our own Revolution, though the quarrel certainly began about a point of law, yet the enthusiasm which carried it through disaster and privation to success was kindled and kept alive by the few pregnant abstractions into which the genius of Jefferson had condensed the principles of Bodin and Sidney and the eloquence of Rousseau. No wiser man, according to the wisdom of the world, ever lived than Goethe, and he said, "Woe to the man who has trampled on the dreams of his youth;" that is, the power...
...survive as Lucretius survives, through the splendor of certain sunbursts of imagination refusing for a passionate moment to be subdued by the unwilling material in which it is forced to work, while that material takes fire in the working as it can and will only in the hands of genius? His teaching, whatever it was, is part of the air we breathe, and has lost that charm of exclusion and privilege that kindled and kept alive the zeal of his acolytes while it was still sectarian or even heretical. but he has that surest safeguard against oblivion, that imperishable incentive...
...best give the idea of what the peculiar power which lies in style is,- Pindar, Virgil, Dante, Milton. An example of the peculiar effect which these poets produce, you can hardly give from German poetry. Examples enough you can give from German poetry of the effect produced by genius, thought, and feeling expressing themselves in clear language, simple language, passionate language, eloquent language, with harmony and melody; but not of the peculiar effect exercised by eminent power of style. Every reader of Dante can at once call to mind what the peculiar effect I mean is; I spoke...
...life to impart style into German literature, and firmly to establish it there. Hence the immense importance to him of the world of classical art, and of the productions of Greek or Latin genuine, where style so eminently manifests its power. Had he found in the German genius and literature an element of style existing by nature and ready to his hand, half his work, one may say, would have been saved him, and he might have done much more in poetry. But as it was, he had to try and create, out of his own powers, a style...
...example of the honesty which is his nation's excellence, he can seldom even show himself brave, resolute, and truthful, without showing a strong dash of coarseness and commonness all the while; the right definition of Luther, as of our own Bunyan, is that he is a Philistine of genius. So Luther's sincere idiomatic German,- such language as this: "Hilf lieber Gott, wie manchen Jammer habe ich gesehen, dass der gemeine Mann doch so gar nichts Weiss von der christlichen Lehre:"- no more proves a power of style in German literature, than Cobbett's sinewy idiomatic. Power of style...