John ShaqiResearch Library

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Library of the best American literature: Containing the lives of our authors in story form, their portraits, their homes, and their personal traits, how they worked and what they wrote; choice selections from eminent writers, embracing great American poets and novelists, foremost women in American letters, distinguished critics and essayists, our national humorists, noted journalists and magazine contributors, popular writers for young people, great orators and public lecturers

General

Library of the best American literature: Containing the lives of our authors in story form, their portraits, their homes, and their personal traits, how they worked and what they wrote; choice selections from eminent writers, embracing great American poets and novelists, foremost women in American letters, distinguished critics and essayists, our national humorists, noted journalists and magazine contributors, popular writers for young people, great orators and public lecturers

American literature

But the rage of traveling is itself only a symptom of a deeper
unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is
vagabond, and the universal system of education fosters restlessness.
Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We
imitate; and what is imitation but the traveling of the mind? Our
houses are built with foreign taste; our shelves are garnished with
foreign ornaments; our opinions, our tastes, our whole minds, lean to
and follow the past and the distant as the eyes of a maid follow her
mistress. The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished.
It was in his own mind that the artist sought his model. It was
an application of his own thought to the thing to be done and the
conditions to be observed. And why need we copy the Doric or the
Gothic model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought and quaint
expression are as near to us as to any, and if the American artist
will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by him,
considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants
of the people, the habit and form of the government, he will create
a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and taste and
sentiment will be satisfied also.

                   *       *       *       *       *


                    THE COMPENSATION OF CALAMITY.

WE cannot part with our friends. We cannot let our angels go. We do
not see that they only go out that archangels may come in. We are
idolaters of the old. We do not believe in the riches of the soul,
in its proper eternity and omnipresence. We do not believe there is
any force in to-day to rival or recreate that beautiful yesterday.
We linger in the ruins of the old tent, where once we had bread and
shelter and organs, nor believe that the spirit can feed, cover and
nerve us again. We cannot find aught so dear, so sweet, so graceful.
But we sit and weep in vain. The voice of the Almighty saith, “Up and
onward for evermore!” We cannot stay amid the ruins, neither will we
rely on the new; and so we walk ever with reverted eyes, like those
monsters who look backwards.

Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.

Opening the text

General

Library of the best American literature: Containing the lives of our authors in story form, their portraits, their homes, and their personal traits, how they worked and what they wrote; choice selections from eminent writers, embracing great American poets and novelists, foremost women in American letters, distinguished critics and essayists, our national humorists, noted journalists and magazine contributors, popular writers for young people, great orators and public lecturers

American literature

But the rage of traveling is itself only a symptom of a deeper
unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is
vagabond, and the universal system of education fosters restlessness.
Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We
imitate; and what is imitation but the traveling of the mind? Our
houses are built with foreign taste; our shelves are garnished with
foreign ornaments; our opinions, our tastes, our whole minds, lean to
and follow the past and the distant as the eyes of a maid follow her
mistress. The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished.
It was in his own mind that the artist sought his model. It was
an application of his own thought to the thing to be done and the
conditions to be observed. And why need we copy the Doric or the
Gothic model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought and quaint
expression are as near to us as to any, and if the American artist
will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by him,
considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants
of the people, the habit and form of the government, he will create
a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and taste and
sentiment will be satisfied also.

                   *       *       *       *       *


                    THE COMPENSATION OF CALAMITY.

WE cannot part with our friends. We cannot let our angels go. We do
not see that they only go out that archangels may come in. We are
idolaters of the old. We do not believe in the riches of the soul,
in its proper eternity and omnipresence. We do not believe there is
any force in to-day to rival or recreate that beautiful yesterday.
We linger in the ruins of the old tent, where once we had bread and
shelter and organs, nor believe that the spirit can feed, cover and
nerve us again. We cannot find aught so dear, so sweet, so graceful.
But we sit and weep in vain. The voice of the Almighty saith, “Up and
onward for evermore!” We cannot stay amid the ruins, neither will we
rely on the new; and so we walk ever with reverted eyes, like those
monsters who look backwards.

Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.

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