Biographia Literaria; Or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, Volume 1

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Rest Fenner, 23, Paternoster Row, 1817 - 296 pages
First edition of this autobiography in discourse.

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Page 220 - Keen Pangs of Love, awakening as a babe Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart ; And Fears self-willed, that shunned the eye of Hope; And Hope that scarce would know itself from Fear ; Sense of past Youth, and Manhood come in vain, And Genius given, and Knowledge won in vain...
Page 296 - The primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.
Page 19 - Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows While proudly riding o'er the azure realm In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes; Youth on the prow, and pleasure at the helm; Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind's sway, That, hush'd in grim repose, expects his evening prey.
Page 184 - Who, too deep for his hearers, still went on refining, And thought of convincing, while they thought of dining...
Page 124 - ... wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem of the mind's self-experience in the act of thinking.
Page 9 - In our own English compositions, (at least for the last three years of our school education), he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words.
Page 160 - To vital spirits aspire, to animal, To intellectual; give both life and sense, Fancy and understanding ; whence the Soul Reason receives, and Reason is her being, Discursive, or Intuitive: Discourse Is oftest yours, the latter most is ours, Differing but in degree, of kind the same.
Page 17 - Well were it for me, perhaps, had I never relapsed into the same mental disease, if I had continued to pluck the flower and reap the harvest from the cultivated surface. instead of delving in the unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic depths.
Page 83 - ... arbitrary and illogical phrases, at once hackneyed, and fantastic, which hold so distinguished a place in the technique of ordinary poetry, and will, more or less, alloy the earlier poems of the truest genius, unless the attention has been specifically directed to their worthlessness and incongruity...
Page 227 - It cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir, with the precious onyx, or the sapphire.

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