Word: onely
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Dates: during 1873-1873
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...Sing one more strain, I know 't will be the last...
...least, tame, and after every essay there seem to be printed the words, "Haec fabula docet." What articles are not of this nature are the merest society twaddle. Servant-girls and babies may be very pleasant topics of conversation to these young ladies, but they are hardly the subjects one would choose to drag before the public in an essay for a quarterly, and in such a place thorough discussion of a matter is expected rather than a superficial narration. Besides all this, such articles as "The Moon Hoax" - a valuable piece of information, no doubt - are more suited...
...human nature on all its sides, in all its capacities; that it presses ever onwards to an ampler growth, to a gradual harmonious expansion of those gifts of thought and feeling which make the peculiar dignity, wealth, and happiness of human nature. Surely a high purpose, but one not incapable of being but partly understood or not understood at all; and thus culture comes to seem to many people the ability to talk on any subject readily and fluently enough for five minutes or perhaps a quarter of an hour, to know a little music, a little science, a little...
...One sees this misapprehension in reading-men who rush through book after book - novels, sermons, poems, biographies, travels, plays, histories - only that they may feel, when they have finished, that they have read them and are therefore "well-read" men. How different from people in the last century, who perused their Clarissa Harlowe, Rape of the Lock, Pilgrim's Progress, and Shakespeare till they almost knew them by heart, and thoroughly understood and appreciated much that was in them! Would it not be better if we, in our day, could only bring ourselves to give up the one thousand...
Some, perhaps, will deny the value of this thorough mastery of a few branches of knowledge instead of an acquaintance with all; in answer, two considerations might be brought up, - one the effect on character of becoming perfectly certain in some department of learning, feeling that in one thing at least success has been attained and not merely half-way work; the other an argument from the desire for culture - true culture - itself the training of the whole mind, not by vague ideas gained in careless study or reading, but by definite, clear-cut knowledge of that for which...