Literary and Social Essays

By Curtis, George William

Book Id: WPLBN0000609940
Format Type: PDF eBook
File Size: 0.8 MB
Reproduction Date:

Title:	Literary and Social Essays
Author:	Curtis, George William
Volume:
Language:	English
Subject:	Literature & thought, Literature and history, Literature & philosophy
Collections:	Project Gutenberg Consortia Center
Historic Publication Date:
Publisher:	Project Gutenberg Consortia Center


Citation APA MLA Chicago Curtis, G. W. (n.d.). Literary and Social Essays. Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.us/

Excerpt
EMERSON. The village of Concord, Massachusetts, lies an hour?s ride from Boston, upon the Great Northern Railway. It is one of those quiet New England towns, whose few white houses, grouped upon the plain, make but a slight impression upon the mind of the busy traveler hurrying to or from the city. As the conductor shouts ?Concord!? the busy traveler has scarcely time to recall ?Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill? before the town has vanished and he is darting through woods and fields as solitary as those he has just left in New Hampshire. Yet as it vanishes he may chance to ?see? two or three spires, and as they rush behind the trees his eyes fall upon a gleaming sheet of water. It is Walden Pond?or Walden Water, as Orphic Alcott used to call it?whose virgin seclusion was a just image of that of the little village, until one afternoon, some half-dozen or more years since, a shriek, sharper than any that had rung from Walden woods since the last war-whoop of the last Indians of Musketaquid, announced to astonished Concord, drowsing in the river meadows, that the nineteenth century had overtaken it. Yet long before the material force of the age bound the town to the rest of the world, the spiritual force of a single mind in it had attracted attention to it, and made its lonely plains as dear to many widely scattered minds as the groves of the Academy or the vineyards of Vaucluse.

Table of Contents
CONTENTS EMERSON _Homes of American Authors, 1854._ HAWTHORNE _Homes of American Authors, 1854._ THE WORKS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE _North American Review_, Vol. XCIX., 1864. RACHEL _Putnam's Magazine_, Vol. VI., 1855. THACKERAY IN AMERICA _Putnam's Magazine_, Vol. I., 1853. SIR PHILIP SIDNEY Hitherto unpublished. Written in 1857. LONGFELLOW HARPER'S MAGAZINE, Vol. LXV., 1882. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES HARPER'S MAGAZINE, Vol. LXXXIII., 1891. WASHINGTON IRVING Read at Ashfield, 1889. Printed by the Grolier Club, 1892.