Life Without and Life Within; or, Reviews, Narratives, Essays, and Poems.Fuller, Margaret
History
Life Without and Life Within; or, Reviews, Narratives, Essays, and Poems.
Fuller, Margaret
Essays; Literature -- History and criticism; Poetry
Brown,--man of the brooding eye, the teeming brain, the deep and fervent
heart,--if thy country prize thee not, and had almost lost thee out of
sight, it is because her heart is made shallow and cold, her eye dim, by
the pomp of circumstance, the love of gross outward gain. She cannot
long continue thus, for it takes a great deal of soul to keep a huge
body from disease and dissolution. As there is more soul, thou wilt be
more sought; and many will yet sit down with thy Constantia to the meal
and water on which she sustained her full and thoughtful existence, who
could not endure the ennui of aldermanic dinners, or find any relish in
the imitation of French cookery. To-day many will read the words, and
some have a cup large enough to receive the spirit, before it is lost in
the sand on which their feet are planted.
Brown's high standard of the delights of intellectual communion and of
friendship, correspond with the fondest hopes of early days. But in the
relations of real life, at present, there is rarely more than one of the
parties ready for such intercourse as he describes. On the one side
there will be dryness, want of perception, or variety, a stupidity
unable to appreciate life's richest boon when offered to its grasp; and
the finer nature is doomed to retrace its steps, unhappy as those who,
having force to raise a spirit, cannot retain or make it substantial,
and stretch out their arms only to bring them back empty to the breast.
We were glad to see these reprints, but sorry to see them so carelessly
done. Under the cheap system, the carelessness in printing and
translating grows to a greater excess day by day. Please, Public, to
remonstrate; else very soon all your books will be offered for two
shillings apiece, and none of them in a fit state to be read.
EDGAR A. POE.[9]
Mr. Poe throws down the gauntlet in his preface by what he says of "the
paltry compensations, or more paltry commendations, of mankind." Some
champion might be expected to start up from the "somewhat sizable" class
embraced, or, more properly speaking, boxed on the ear, by this
defiance, who might try whether the sting of Criticism was as
indifferent to this knight of the pen as he professes its honey to be.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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