Word: thoughts
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Dates: during 1890-1899
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...lower sense it is also practically useful. For it is also a study of style. We win from it the secret of expression, we learn how shallow artifice is and how wearisome it becomes, we learn also how profound is Art, and how it is able to eternize the thought, the fancy, the feeling of some man who has been dust for centuries...
...bonis ambula, holds as good of books as of men. If the mind, like the dyer's hand, becomes insensibly subdued to what it works in, so also may it steep itself in a noble and victorious mood, may sweeten itself with a refinement that feels a vulgar thought like a stain, and store up sunshine against darker days. It is the books which heighten and clarify the character, whose seciety I would bid you seek. I think they tend to keep us pure. They disinfect the imagination; they fill the memory with light and fragrance. Whatever...
...less clearly in view; to grasp as well as I could and to illustrate such laws of criticism as seemed to me perennial in their application, and to leave aside as rubbish that dead leafage of deciduous facts which is swept rustling to and fro in the avenues of thought by the shifting breath of opinion...
...meaning, that we now first learn the secret of the words we have been using or misusing all our lives, and are gradually made aware that to set forth even the plainest matter, as it should be set forth, is not only a very difficult thing, calling for thought and practice, but an affair of conscience as well. Translating teaches us as nothing else can, not only that there is a best way, but that it is the only way. Those who have tried it know too well how easy it is to grasp the verbal meaning of a sentence...
...learns than how he learns it. The day will come, nay, it is dawning already, when it will be understood that the masterpieces of whatever language are not to be classed by an arbitrary standard, but stand on the same level in virtue of being masterpieces; that thought, imagination and fancy may make even a patois acceptable to scholars; that the poets of all climes and of all ages "sing to one clear harp in divers tones;" and that the masters of prose and the masters of verse in all tongues teach the same lesson and exact the same...