The Project Gutenberg eBook, Literary and General Lectures and Essays, by
Charles Kingsley

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Title: Literary and General Lectures and Essays

Author: Charles Kingsley

Release Date: February 10, 2004 [eBook #11026]

Language: English

Character set encoding: US-ASCII

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITERARY AND GENERAL LECTURES AND
ESSAYS***

Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

LITERARY AND GENERAL ESSAYS

Contents: {0}
The Stage as it was Once
Thoughts on Shelley and Byron
Alexander Smith and Alexander Pope
Tennyson
Burns and his School
The Poetry of Sacred and Legendary Art
On English Composition
On English Literature
Grots and Groves
Hours with the Mystics
Frederick Denison Maurice: In Memoriam

THE STAGE AS IT WAS ONCE {1}

Let us think for a while upon what the Stage was once, in a republic
of the past--what it may be again, I sometimes dream, in some
republic of the future. In order to do this, let me take you back in
fancy some 2314 years--440 years before the Christian era, and try to
sketch for you--alas! how clumsily--a great, though tiny people, in
one of their greatest moments--in one of the greatest moments, it may
be, of the human race. For surely it is a great and a rare moment
for humanity, when all that is loftiest in it--when reverence for the
Unseen powers, reverence for the heroic dead, reverence for the
fatherland, and that reverence, too, for self, which is expressed in
stateliness and self-restraint, in grace and courtesy; when all
these, I say, can lend themselves, even for a day, to the richest
enjoyment of life--to the enjoyment of beauty in form and sound, and
of relaxation, not brutalising, but ennobling.

Rare, alas! have such seasons been in the history of poor humanity.
But when they have come, they have lifted it up one stage higher
thenceforth. Men, having been such once, may become such again; and
the work which such times have left behind them becomes immortal.

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.

Let me take you to the then still unfurnished theatre of Athens, hewn
out of the limestone rock on the south-