The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
Philosophy
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
Yet what has holy page more sweet,
Or what had woman's love more fair
When Mary clasped her Saviour's feet
With flowing eyes and streaming hair?
Meek child of sorrow, walk unknown.
The Angel of that earthly throng,
And let thine image live alone
To hallow this unstudied song!
LITERARY NOTICES.
_Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time, with other Papers._ By CHARLES
KINGSLEY, Author of "Hypatia," "Two Years Ago," etc. Boston: Ticknor &
Fields. 12mo.
This collection of Mr. Kingsley's miscellaneous writings is marked by
the same qualities of mind and temper which have given celebrity and
influence to his novels. An earnest man, with strong convictions
springing from a fervid philanthropy, fertile in thought, confident in
statement, resolute in spirit, with many valuable ideas and not a few
curious crotchets, and master of a style singularly bold, vivid,
passionate, and fluent, he always stimulates the mind, if he does not
always satisfy it. The defects of his intellect, especially in the
treatment of historical questions, proceed from the warmth of his
temperament. His impulses irritate his reason. Intellectually impatient
with all facts and arguments which obstruct the full sweep of his
theory, he has an offensive habit of escaping from objections he will
not pause to answer, by the calling of names and the introduction of
Providence. He is most petulantly disdainful of others when he has
nothing but paradoxes with which to oppose their truisms. He has a trick
of adopting the manner and expressions of Carlyle, in speaking of
incidents and characters to which they are ludicrously inapplicable, and
becomes flurried and flippant on occasions where Carlyle would put into
the same words his whole scowling and scornful strength. He frequently
mistakes sympathy with suffering for insight into its causes, and an
eloquent statement of what he thinks desirable for an interpretation of
what really is. He has bright glimpses of truth, but they are due rather
to the freedom of his thinking than to its depth; and in the hurry and
impatient pressure of his impulses, he does not discriminate between his
ideas and his whims. He seems to be in a state of insurrection against
the limitations of his creed, his profession, and his own mind, and the
impression conveyed by his best passages is of splendid incompleteness.
It would be ungracious to notice these defects in a writer who possesses
so many excellences, were it not that he forces them upon the attention,
and in their expression is unjust to other thinkers. His intellectual
conceit finds its vent in intellectual sauciness, and is all the worse
from appearing to have its source in conceit of conscience and
benevolence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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