Word: human
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1870-1879
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What is Shakespeare - the copyist of the minutest details of human experience - to me when I can revel in the imaginary haps and mishaps of gods and demi-gods? What the conciseness of Pope, the grandeur of Milton, the exquisite finish of Tennyson, the beauties and excellences of all modern genius, when I can find the semblance of these qualities in a language of two thousand years...
...love the Classics. I venerate the ancients, because their knowledge of nature was superior to ours, their science more advanced, their ideas of the human relations broader and purer, and, finally, because my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather venerated and studied them before me. "With a loud voice I shall respond to every ruthless attempt to tear from our college course the study of their language: Procul, O procul este, profani...
...gain for them something of the attention which is usually bestowed upon literature of a lighter sort. The first is an able refutation of that unscientific theory - as it seems to many - advocated by Tyndall, which seeks to estimate the value of prayer by a test applicable only to human science, and which implies something very like omniscience in those who are to make the experiment...
...Some glimmering of its nature may be derived from the following sentence: "Perhaps there is something in the nature of the classics (for it is in the men who have to do with these that we notice chiefly a tendency to Johnsonian faults) which, when it has impregnated the human system, works upon the internal organization of its victim, and finally culminates in a morbid sensitiveness in regard to the musty languages of the ancients, which, whenever any unlucky student fails to comprehend the manifold beauties of some brain-racking passage, breaks out into an ungovernable passion, and vents itself...
...unavoidable concomitant of every struggle where all cannot win, and does more good than harm. It may be said that the fame of winning this scholarship will be a partial inducement to the contesting student. Such will undoubtedly be the case until young saints come to college and human weaknesses are known only to the uneducated...