The Works of Thomas Carlyle: Critical and miscellaneous essays

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C. Scribner's Sons, 1899

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Page 1 - Blood hath been shed ere now, i' the olden time, Ere humane statute purged the gentle weal ; Ay, and since too, murders have been perform'd Too terrible for the ear : the time has been, That, when the brains were out, the man would die, And there an end...
Page 294 - Farewell, old Coila's hills and dales, Her heathy moors and winding vales ; The scenes where wretched fancy roves, Pursuing past, unhappy loves ! Farewell, my friends ! Farewell, my foes ! My peace with these, my love with those — The bursting tears my heart declare, Farewell, the bonnie banks of Ayr ! THE FAREWELL.
Page 277 - Are we a piece of machinery, which, like the /Eolian harp, passive, takes the impression of the passing accident ; or do these workings argue something within us above the trodden clod ? I own myself partial to such proofs of those awful and important realities : a God that made all things, man's immaterial and immortal nature, and a world of weal or wo beyond death and the grave.
Page 259 - In one word, what and how produced was the effect of society on him; what and how produced was his effect on society ? He who should answer these questions, in regard to any individual, would, as we believe, furnish a model of perfection in Biography.
Page 361 - Nemesis visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation...
Page 272 - Tears lie in him, and consuming fire; as lightning lurks in the drops of the summer cloud. He has a resonance in his bosom for every note of human feeling; the high and the low, the sad, the ludicrous, the joyful, are welcome in their turns to his ' lightly-moved and allconceiving spirit.
Page 275 - But all the faculties of Burns's mind were, as far as I could judge, equally vigorous; and his predilection for poetry was rather the result of his own enthusiastic and impassioned temper, than of a genius exclusively adapted to that species of composition. From his conversation, I should have pronounced him to be fitted to excel in whatever walk of ambition he had chosen to exert his abilities.
Page 157 - Faust is a man who has quitted the ways of vulgar men, without light to guide him on a better way. No longer restricted by the sympathies, the common interests and common persuasions by which the mass of mortals, each individually ignorant, nay, it may be, stolid and altogether blind as to the proper aim of life, are yet held together, and, like stones in the channel of a...
Page 264 - ... quick to learn'; a man of keen vision, before whom common disguises afforded no concealment. His understanding saw through the hollowness even of accomplished deceivers; but there was a generous credulity in his heart. And so did our Peasant show himself among us; ' a soul like an /Koliun harp, in whose strings the vulgar wind, as it passed through them, changed itself into articulate melody.
Page 316 - In its judgments of such men; unjust on many grounds, of which this one may be stated as the substance : It decides, like a court of law, by dead statutes; and not positively but negatively, less on what is done right, than on what is or is not done wrong. Not the few inches of deflection from the mathematical orbit, which are so easily measured, but the ratio of these to the whole diameter, constitutes the real aberration.

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