FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   225   226   227   228   229   230   231   232   233   234   235   236   237   238   239   240   241   242   243   >>  
their-kings- in-chains-and-their-nobles-in-fetters-of-iron. His verse smacks of the old Puritan flavor. Holmes has a gentler mission. His careless, genial humor reminds us of James Smith in his _Rejected Addresses_ and of Horace in _London_. Long may he live to make broader the face of our care- ridden generation, and to realize for himself the truth of the wise man's declaration that a "merry heart is a continual feast." FAME AND GLORY. Notice of an Address before the Literary Society of Amherst College, by Charles Sumner. THE learned and eloquent author of the pamphlet lying before us with the above title belongs to a class, happily on the increase in our country, who venture to do homage to unpopular truths in defiance of the social and political tyranny of opinion which has made so many of our statesmen, orators, and divines the mere playthings and shuttlecocks of popular impulses for evil far oftener than for good. His first production, the _True Grandeur of Nations_, written for the anniversary of American Independence, was not more remarkable for its evidences of a highly cultivated taste and wide historical research than for its inculcation of a high morality,--the demand for practical Christianity in nations as well as individuals. It burned no incense under the nostrils of an already inflated and vain people. It gratified them by no rhetorical falsehoods about "the land of the free and the home of the brave." It did not apostrophize military heroes, nor strut "red wat shod" over the plains of battle, nor call up, like another Ezekiel, from the valley of vision the dry bones thereof. It uttered none of the precious scoundrel cant, so much in vogue after the annexation of Texas was determined upon, about the destiny of the United States to enter in and possess the lands of all whose destiny it is to live next us, and to plant everywhere the "peculiar institutions" of a peculiarly Christian and chosen people, the landstealing propensity of whose progressive republicanism is declared to be in accordance with the will and by the grace of God, and who, like the Scotch freebooter,-- "Pattering an Ave Mary When he rode on a border forray,"-- while trampling on the rights of a sister republic, and re-creating slavery where that republic had abolished it, talk piously of "the designs of Providence" and the Anglo-Saxon instrumentalities thereof in "extending the area
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   225   226   227   228   229   230   231   232   233   234   235   236   237   238   239   240   241   242   243   >>  



Top keywords:
thereof
 

destiny

 

republic

 

people

 

valley

 

incense

 

vision

 

Ezekiel

 

nostrils

 
burned

nations

 

falsehoods

 

scoundrel

 

precious

 

individuals

 

uttered

 

military

 
heroes
 
apostrophize
 
gratified

battle

 

rhetorical

 

inflated

 

plains

 

possess

 

forray

 

border

 

trampling

 
sister
 

rights


freebooter
 
Scotch
 

Pattering

 
creating
 
Providence
 
instrumentalities
 

extending

 

designs

 
piously
 
slavery

abolished
 

Christianity

 

States

 
United
 
annexation
 

determined

 

peculiar

 

declared

 

republicanism

 

accordance