The United States have produced authors not a few; among some names not the most famous, perhaps, on the popular tongue, are two or three names of their poets; but they have hardly given to the world more than one man of letters--judicious, judicial, disinterested, patient, happy, temperate, delighted.The colonial days, with the 'painful' divines who brought the parish into the wilderness; the experimental period of ambition and attempts at a literature that should be young as the soil and much younger than the race; the civil-war years, with a literature that matched the self-conscious and inexpert heroism of the army;--none of these periods of the national life could fitly be represented by a man of letters.And though James Russell Lowell was the contemporary of the 'transcendentalists,' and a man of middle age when the South seceded, and though indeed his fame as a Yankee humourist is to be discerned through the smoke and the dust, through the gravity and the burlesque, of the war, clear upon the other side, yet he was virtually the child of national leisure, of moderation and education, an American of the seventies and onwards.He represented the little-recognised fact that in ripeness, not in rawness, consists the excellence of Americans -an excellence they must be content to share with contemporary nations, however much it may cost them to abandon we know not what bounding ambitions which they have never succeeded in definitely describing in words.Mr.Lowell was a refutation of the fallacy that an American can never be American enough.He ranked with the students and the critics among all nations, and nothing marks his transatlantic conditions except, perhaps, that his scholarliness is a little anxious and would not seem so; he enriches his phrases busily, and yet would seem composed; he makes his allusions tread closely one upon another, and there is an assumed carelessness, and an ill-concealed vigilance, as to the effect their number and their erudition will produce upon the reader.The American sensitiveness takes with him that pleasantest of forms; his style confesses more than he thinks of the loveable weakness of national vanity, and asks of the stranger now andagain, 'Well, what do you think of my country?'
同类推荐
热门推荐
告诉你99个成功秘密
《告诉你99个成功秘密》(作者董瑶)是一本砥砺人生意志、品质和智慧的书。作者从浩如烟海的资料中精心收集了99个故事,故事中的主人公有的是百世经典式人物,有的是时代新秀,有的是普通“小人物”,有的是身残志坚,有的是光彩照人的明星,有的是文学大师,有的是科学巨匠……《告诉你99个成功秘密》故事丰富多彩,不拘一格。回放他们人生的精彩片段,品悟并分享他们的成功与喜悦,一定会为我们找到一把打开人生成功之门的金钥匙。约翰·牛顿传:真正福乐,永久财宝
本书是约翰·牛顿的同事理查德·塞西尔根据他的书信编写,是其它牛顿传记的资料来源。前半部分是牛顿的自述,讲述了他前半生的传奇经历;后半部分是作者根据各方资料以及自己对牛顿的了解撰写,讲述了他成为国教牧师之后事业,尤其是他协助废奴运动的事迹。约翰·牛顿是英国历史上著名的浪子回头的表率。他曾是无赖一样的人物,不学无术,放荡形骸,后去非洲闯荡,吃尽了苦头。父亲派人将他找回,但回国的船遇险,跌跌撞撞才返回英国。这趟旅途成了他人生的转折点,他认识到人生的短暂,自己从前是多么地不堪,痛改前非。