Word: idealists
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Improve the river-front! Never, since some wild Idealist suggested making Harvard Square a business centre, has such a radical suggestion been heard, Conceal that triumph of architecture, the boiler-factory, in a spinney of Japanese hemlocks! Cover those pebbly, tin-canned shores, where laps the limpid Charles, with clumps of alligator pear trees and groo-groo palms! Yet the scheme has its advantages. The exiled Freshman, in his far-off lonely habitation, may feel that he has at least sympathy, if he can watch from his window the weeping willows drooping over the water. The lone oarsman can compromise...
...sometimes hear that "art for art's sake is decadent--whatever that means." It ought not to mean anything. As a matter of fact it does mean that the disciple of the doctrine thinks himself freed from the truth that morality has any relation to art. A pure-souled idealist like Shelley could depart from traditional codes of morals and make for himself a new code that was yet noble. But Shelley escaped, in his poetry, from the vulgar details of life into an ideal world inhabited by ideal beings whose childlike vision was as pure as his. Even...
This leads again to consideration of the ambitious quality of the play. Its mood is the mood of poetic drama, but its matter is contemporary and actual. One is given at times a conviction that if a millionaire, instead of a practical but unmoneyed idealist were leading them, the Jews would follow as one man. So much of necessity has money meant to them. But then again one sees only the sublime doggedness of their one highest ideal-resisting compromise. The play in short sets one thinking, sets one contemplating a great ungathered people's fate as well...
...next point which the lecturer treated at considerable length was the attitude of the ethical idealist who aims steadily at perfection, and cares more for the quality of life than for its duration. It is a great help to a soul which is beginning to realize that human life is not finite to come under the influence of great man who convinces everyone that his personality, at least, does not end with this life...
Schiller was an idealist in the true meaning of the word, continued Mr. Thayer, having as his aim an ideal which should help all mankind, a supreme love of liberty. Firm in this ideal, he passed the first part of his life protesting against the servile conditions he saw about him. From the bitter disappointment caused by the failure of the French revolution to effect the liberty and happiness he so much desired, Schiller, the true idealist, rose triumphant, and devoted the rest of his life to teaching and uplifting the character by setting up, in his works, shining examples...