Carlyle's Essay on Burns

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Ginn, 1897 - 84 trang
Carlyle's introduction to Burns is admirable, comprehensive, fair, and sympathetic with the biographical material effectively used in interpreting the life and the work. The man, his life, and his work are peculiarly inseparable, and Carlyle deploys all his skill in treating the three subjects as one, while rendering many a valuable criticism.
 

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Trang 74 - I find this conclusion more impressed upon me, — that the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, — all in one.
Trang 48 - There was a strong expression of sense and shrewdness in all his lineaments ; the eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical character and temperament. It was large and of a dark cast, which glowed, I say literally glowed, when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human head, though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time.
Trang 25 - 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 woe beyond death and the grave.
Trang 25 - I never hear the loud solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of gray plover in an autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or poetry.
Trang 38 - And wi' the lave ilk merry morn Could rank my rig and lass, Still shearing, and clearing The tither stocked raw, Wi' claivers, an' haivers, Wearing the day awa : Ev'n then a wish, (I mind its power,) A wish that to my latest hour Shall strongly heave my breast ; That I for poor auld Scotland's sake, Some usefu' plan, or beuk could make, Or sing a sang at least.
Trang 34 - Such grace and truth of external movement, too, presupposes in general a corresponding force and truth of sentiment and inward meaning. The Songs of Burns are not more perfect in the former quality than in the latter. With what tenderness he sings, yet with what vehemence and...
Trang 48 - Burns seemed much affected by the print, or rather by the ideas which it suggested to his mind. He actually shed tears. He asked whose the lines were; and it chanced that nobody but myself remembered that they occur in a halfforgotten poem of Langhorne's, called by the unpromising title of
Trang 16 - The poet, we imagine, can never have far to seek for a subject : the elements of his art are in him, and around him on every hand; for him the Ideal world is not remote from the Actual, but under it and within it : nay, he is a poet, precisely because he can discern it there.
Trang 68 - ... such, it carries with it a lesson of deep, impressive significance. Surely it would become such a man, furnished for the highest of all enterprises, that of being the Poet of his Age, to consider well what it is that he attempts, and in what spirit he attempts it. For the words of Milton are true in all times, and were never truer than in this: ' He who would write heroic poems must make his whole life a heroic poem.
Trang xii - The collection of songs was my vade mecum. I pored over them, driving my cart or walking to labor, song by song, verse by verse, carefully noting the true tender or sublime from affectation and fustian. I am convinced I owe much to this for my critic-craft, such as it is.

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