Thomas Carlyle. 1795-1881.
Except by name, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter is little known out of Germany. The only thing connected with him, we think, that has reached this country is his saying,—imported by Madame de Staël, and thankfully pocketed by most newspaper critics,—"Providence has given to the French the empire of the land; to the English that of the sea; to the Germans that of—the air!"
Richter. Edinburgh Review, 1827.
Literary men are... a perpetual priesthood.
State of German Literature. Edinburgh Review, 1827.
[578]
Clever men are good, but they are not the best.
Goethe. Edinburgh Review, 1828.
We are firm believers in the maxim that for all right judgment of any man or thing it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.
Goethe. Edinburgh Review, 1828.
How does the poet speak to men with power, but by being still more a man than they?
Burns. Edinburgh Review, 1828.
A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility.
Burns. Edinburgh Review, 1828.
His religion at best is an anxious wish,—like that of Rabelais, a great Perhaps.
Burns. Edinburgh Review, 1828.
We have oftener than once endeavoured to attach some meaning to that aphorism, vulgarly imputed to Shaftesbury, which however we can find nowhere in his works, that "ridicule is the test of truth."[578:1]
Voltaire. Foreign Review, 1829.
We must repeat the often repeated saying, that it is unworthy a religious man to view an irreligious one either with alarm or aversion, or with any other feeling than regret and hope and brotherly commiseration.
Voltaire. Foreign Review, 1829.
There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.
Sir Walter Scott. London and Westminster Review, 1838.
[579]
Silence is deep as Eternity, speech is shallow as Time.
Sir Walter Scott. London and Westminster Review, 1838.
To the very last, he [Napoleon] had a kind of idea; that, namely, of la carrière ouverte aux talents,—the tools to him that can handle them.[579:1]
Sir Walter Scott. London and Westminster Review, 1838.
Blessed is the healthy nature; it is the coherent, sweetly co-operative, not incoherent, self-distracting, self-destructive one!
Sir Walter Scott. London and Westminster Review, 1838.
The uttered part of a man's life, let us always repeat, bears to the unuttered, unconscious part a small unknown proportion. He himself never knows it, much less do others.
Sir Walter Scott. London and Westminster Review, 1838.
Literature is the Thought of thinking Souls.
Sir Walter Scott. London and Westminster Review, 1838.
It can be said of him, when he departed he took a Man's life with him. No sounder piece of British manhood was put together in that eighteenth century of Time.
Sir Walter Scott. London and Westminster Review, 1838.
The eye of the intellect "sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing."
Varnhagen Von Ense's Memoirs. London and Westminster Review, 1838.
Happy the people whose annals are blank in history-books.[579:2]
Life of Frederick the Great. Book xvi. Chap. i.
As the Swiss inscription says: Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden,—"Speech is silvern, Silence is golden;" or, as I might rather express it, Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity.
Sartor Resartus. Book iii. Chap. iii.
The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.[579:3]
Heroes and Hero-Worship. The Hero as a Prophet.
[580]
In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time: the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.
Heroes and Hero-Worship. The Hero as a Man of Letters.
The true University of these days is a Collection of Books.
Heroes and Hero-Worship. The Hero as a Man of Letters.
One life,—a little gleam of time between two Eternities.
Heroes and Hero-Worship. The Hero as a Man of Letters.
Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity there are a hundred that will stand adversity.
Heroes and Hero-Worship. The Hero as a Man of Letters.
Footnotes
[578:1] How comes it to pass, then, that we appear such cowards in reasoning, and are so afraid to stand the test of ridicule?—Shaftesbury: Characteristics. A Letter concerning Enthusiasm, sect. 2.
Truth, 't is supposed, may bear all lights; and one of those principal lights or natural mediums by which things are to be viewed in order to a thorough recognition is ridicule itself.—Shaftesbury: Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour, sect. 1.
'T was the saying of an ancient sage (Gorgias Leontinus, apud Aristotle's "Rhetoric," lib. iii. c. 18), that humour was the only test of gravity, and gravity of humour. For a subject which would not bear raillery was suspicious; and a jest which would not bear a serious examination was certainly false wit.—Ibid. sect. 5.
[579:1] Carlyle in his essay on Mirabeau, 1837, quotes this from a "New England book."
[579:2] Montesquieu: Aphorism.
[579:3] His only fault is that he has none.—Pliny the Younger: Book ix. Letter xxvi.