Word: nineteenth
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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There, in the annual Oration and Poem, the emphasis on "the promotion of literature" is just as strong as it was when Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his famous address on "The American Scholar" in 1837. In it, in lines which nineteenth century schoolchildren recited at class ceremonies, he expressed the ambitious thoughts which might be the motto of the Phi Beta Kappa Society itself...
...object of this Society," announces the Constitution of Phi Beta Kappa, "is the promotion of literature and friendly intercourse among scholars." But the transformation of the society from a social as well as literary organization, which met as often as once a week in the early nineteenth century, to the honor society of today, which meets only three times a year, has delegated this "promotion of literature" mainly to the yearly literary meeting, at which one oration and one work of poetry are presented...
...might spend one's life pleasantly and very profitably with the secondary writers of the English nineteenth century, the writers whom no one would think to call 'great,' the odd quirky spirits from George Burrow to Mark Rutherford, the travelers, the autobiographers, the essayists, the men who had a particular, perhaps eccentric, thing to say, and said it fully and well, with delight in what they were doing and no worry about greatness. And England is still able to produce and respond to these secondary figures. With us, however, the writer must be great or he is nothing; or believed...
Utility is apparently not so bad, anyway. They say it's used in prisons. And everyone knows that prisoners have been treated humanely ever since the nineteenth century...
England is depicted in English as the country which Dickens describes in The Cricket on the Hearth. The conclusion drawn from this picture of England (in the nineteenth century) is that "Dickens gives many pictures of the hard and ugly life of the working people in capitalist England...