Poets as Dreamers?

My Dream

by Christina Rossetti

Hear now a curious dream I dreamed last night,

Each word whereof is weighed and sifted truth.

I stood beside Euphrates while it swelled

Like overflowing Jordan in its youth:

It waxed and coloured sensibly to sight,

Till out of myriad pregnant waves there welled

Young crocodiles, a gaunt blunt-featured crew,

Fresh-hatched perhaps and daubed with birthday dew.

The rest if I should tell, I fear my friend,

My closest friend would deem the facts untrue;

And therefore it were wisely left untold.

Yet if you will, why, hear it to the end.

Each crocodile was girt with massive gold

And polished stones that with their wearers grew:

But one there was who waxed beyond the rest,

Wore kinglier girdle and a kingly crown,

Whilst crowns and orbs and sceptres starred his breast.

All gleamed compact and green with scale on scale,

But special burnishment adorned his mail

And special terror weighed upon his frown;

His punier brethren quaked before his tail,

Broad as a rafter, potent as a flail.

So he grew lord and master of his kin:

But who shall tell the tale of all their woes?

An execrable appetite arose,

He battened on them, crunched, and sucked them in.

He knew no law, he feared no binding law,

But ground them with inexorable jaw:

The luscious fat distilled upon his chin,

Exuded from his nostrils and his eyes,

While still like a hungry death he fed his maw;

Till every minor crocodile being dead

And buried too, himself gorged to the full,

He slept with breath oppressed and unstrung claw.

Oh marvel passing strange which next I saw:

In sleep he dwindled to the common size,

And all the empire faded from his coat.

Then from far off a winged vessel came,

Swift as a swallow, subtle as a flame:

I know not what it bore of freight or host,

But white it was as an avenging ghost.

It levelled strong Euphrates in its course;

Supreme yet weightless as an idle mote

It seemed to tame the waters without force

Till not a murmur swelled or billow beat:

Lo, as the purple shadow swept the sands,

The prudent crocodile rose on his feet

And shed appropriate tears and wrung his hands.

What can it mean? you ask. I answer not

For meaning, but myself must echo, What?

And tell it as I saw it on the spot.

"The other day we heard someone smilingly refer to poets as dreamers. Now, it is accurate to refer to poets as dreamers, but it is not discerning to infer, as this person did, that the dreams of poets have no practical value beyond the realm of literary diversion. The truth is that poets are just as practical as people who build bridges or look into microscopes ; and just as close to reality and truth. Where they differ from the logician and the scientist is in the temporal sense alone ; they are ahead of their time, whereas logicians and scientists are abreast of their time. We must not be so superficial that we fail to discern the practicableness of dreams.

Dreams are the sunrise streamers heralding a new day of scientific progress, another forward surge. Every forward step man takes in any field of life, is first taken along the dreamy paths of imagination. Robert Fulton did not discover his steamboat with full steam up, straining at a hawser at some Hudson River dock; first he dreamed the steamboat, he and other dreamers, and then scientific wisdom converted a picture in the mind into a reality of steel and wood. The automobile was not dug out of the ground like a nugget of gold ; first men dreamed the automobile and afterward, long afterward, the practical minded engineers caught up with what had been created by winging fantasy.

He who looks deeply and with a seeing eye into the poetry of yesterday finds there all the cold scientific magic of today and much which we shall not enjoy until some tomorrow. If the poet does not dream so clearly that blueprints of this vision can immediately be drawn and the practical conversions immediately effected, he must not for that reason be smiled upon as merely the mental host for a sort of harmless madness.

For the poet, like the engineer, is a specialist. His being, tuned to the life of tomorrow, cannot be turned simultaneously to the life of today. To the scientist he says, "Here, I give you a flash of the future." The wise scientist thanks him, and takes that flash of the future and makes it over into a fibre of today."

Sources:
Commentary: By Glenn Falls
Art Photos by Florence Harrison

Classical Mythology

"Of old the Hellenic race was marked off from the barbarians as more keen-witted and more free from nonsense."

Herodotus I: 60.

Greek and Roman Mythology is quite generally supposed to show us the way the human race thought and felt untold ages ago. Through it, according to this view, we can retrace the path from civilized man who lives so far from nature, to man who lived in close companionship with nature; and the real interest of the myths is that they lead us back to a time when the world was young and people had a connection with the earth, with trees and seas and flowers and hills, unlike anything we ourselves can feel.

When the stories were being shaped, we are given to understand, little distinction had as yet been made between the real and the unreal. The imagination was vividly alive and not checked by the reason, so that anyone in the woods might see through the trees a fleeing nymph or bending over a clear pool to drink, behold in the depths a naiad's face.
The prospect of traveling back to this delightful state of things is held out by nearly every writer who touches upon classical mythology, above all by the poets. In that infinitely remote time primitive man could
"Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or Hear Old Triton blow his wreathed horn."

And we for a moment can catch, through the myths he made, a glimpse of that strangely and beautifully animated world. But a very brief consideration of the ways of uncivilized peoples everywhere and in all ages is enough to prick that romantic bubble. Nothing is clearer than the fact that primitive man, whether in New Guinea today or eons ago in the prehistoric wilderness, is not and never has been a creature who peoples his world with bright fancies and lovely visions. Horrors lurked in the primeval forest, not nymphs and naiads. Terror lived there, with its close attendants, Magic, and its most common defense, Human Sacrifice. Mankind's chief hope of escaping the wrath of whatever divinities were then abroad lay in some magical rite, senseless but poweful, or in some offering made at the cost of pain and grief.

Source: Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes by Edith Hamilton

O Sweet Spontaneous Earth!....

O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting

fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked
thee?,
has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy

beauty? , how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true

to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover

thou answerest


them only with

spring)


 e.e.cummings

Romantic Classics: Nature, Beauty and Power

The Sensitive Plant

Whether the sensitive Plant, or that

Which within its boughs like a Spirit sat,

Ere its outward form had known decay,

Now felt this change, I cannot say.

Whether that Lady's gentle mind,

No longer with the form combined

Which scattered love, as stars do light,

Found sadness, where it left delight,

I cannot guess; but in this life

Of error, ignorance, and strife,

Where nothing is, but all things seem,

And we the shadows of the dream,

It is a modest creed,and yet

Pleasant if one considers it,

To own that death itself must be,

Like all the rest, a mockery.

That garden sweet, that lady fair,

And all sweet shapes and odours there,

In truth have never passed away;

'Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed; not they.

For love, and beauty and delight,

There is no death nor change; their might

Exceeds our organs, which endure

No light, being themselves obscure.

--Percy Bysshe Shelley

Echoes

Late-born and woman-souled I dare not hope,

The freshness of the elder lays, the might

Of manly, modern passion shall alight

Upon my Muse's lips, nor may I cope

(Who veiled and screened by womanhood must grope)

With the world's strong-armed warriors and recite

The dangers, wounds, and triumphs of the fight;

Twanging the full-stringed lyre through all its scope.

But if thou ever in some lake-floored cave

O'erbrowed by rocks, a wild voice wooed and heard,

Answering at once from heaven and earth and wave,

Lending elf-music to thy harshest word,

Misprize thou not these echoes that belong

To one in love with solitude and song.

--Emma Lazarus

Poem 722

Sweet Mountains--Ye tell Me no lie--

Never deny Me--Never fly--

Those same unvarying Eyes

Turn on Me--when I fail--or feign,

Or take the Royal names in vain--

Their far--slow--Violet Gaze--

My Strong Madonnas--Cherish still--

The Wayward Nun--beneath the Hill--

Whose service--is to You--

Her latest Worship--When the Day

Fades from the Firmament away--

To life Her Brows on You--

--Emily Dickinson

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

The Great Pyramid of Giza is the oldest and largest of the three pyramids in the Giza Necropolis bordering what is now Cairo, Egypt in Africa, and is the only remaining member of the Seven Wonders of the World. It is believed to have been built as a tomb for Fourth dynasty Egyptian pharaoh Khufu (hellenized as Χεωψ, Cheops) and constructed over a 20 year period concluding around 2560 BC. The tallest man-made structure in the world for over 3,800 years, it is sometimes called Khufu's Pyramid or the Pyramid of Khufu.

This drawing of Colossus of Rhodes, which illustrated The Grolier Society's 1911 Book of Knowledge, is probably fanciful, as it is unlikely that the statue stood astride the harbour mouth.

Colossus of Rhodes, imagined in a 16th-century engraving by Martin Heemskerck, part of his series of the Seven Wonders of the World.

The Colossus of Rhodes was a colossus of the Greek god Helios, erected on the Greek island of Rhodes by Chares of Lindos between 292 and 280 BC. It's considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Before its destruction, the Colossus of Rhodes stood over 30 meters (107 ft) high, making it the tallest statue of the ancient world.

The lighthouse of Alexandria (or The Pharos of Alexandria, Greek: ὁ Φάρος τῆς Ἀλεξανδρείας) was a tower built in the 3rd century BC (between 285 and 247 BC) on the island of Pharos in Alexandria, Egypt to serve as that port's landmark, and later, its lighthouse.

With a height variously estimated at between 115 ~ 150 meters (377 ~ 492 ft) it was among the tallest man-made structures on Earth for many centuries, and was identified as one of the Seven Wonders of the World by Antipater of Sidon. It was the third tallest building after the two Great Pyramids (of Khufu and Khafra) for its entire life. Some scholars estimate a much taller height exceeding 180 meters that would make the tower the tallest building up to the 14th century.

Statue of Zeus at Olympia was one of the classical Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It was made by the famed classical sculptor Phidias (5th century BC) circa 432 BC in Olympia, Greece. The seated statue, some 40 feet (12 meters) tall, occupied the whole width of the aisle of the temple built to house it. "It seems that if Zeus were to stand up," the geographer Strabo noted early in the 1st century BC, "he would unroof the temple." Zeus was a chryselephantine sculpture, made of ivory and accented with gold plating. In the sculpture, he was seated on a magnificent throne of cedarwood, inlaid with ivory, gold, ebony, and precious stones. In Zeus' right hand there was a small statue of Nike, the goddess of victory, and in his left hand, a shining sceptre on which an eagle perched. Plutarch, in his Life of the Roman general Aemilius Paulus, records that the victor over Macedon “was moved to his soul, as if he had beheld the god in person,” while the Greek orator Dio Chrysostom declared that a single glimpse of the statue would make a man forget his earthly troubles.










Temple of Artemis (Greek: Ἀρτεμίσιον Artemision, Latin: Artemisium), also known less precisely as Temple of Diana, was a temple dedicated to Artemis completed in its most famous phase, around 550 BC at Ephesus (in present-day Turkey) under the Achaemenid dynasty of the Persian Empire. All but nothing remains of the temple, which was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The Temple of Artemis was not the first on its site, where evidence of a sanctuary dates as early as the Bronze Age.

The temple was a 120-year project started by Croesus of Lydia. It was described by Antipater of Sidon, who compiled a list of the Seven Wonders:

I have set eyes on the wall of lofty Babylon on which is a road for chariots, and the statue of Zeus by the Alpheus, and the hanging gardens, and the colossus of the Sun, and the huge labour of the high pyramids, and the vast tomb of Mausolus; but when I saw the house of Artemis that mounted to the clouds, those other marvels lost their brilliancy, and I said, "Lo, apart from Olympus, the Sun never looked on aught (anything) so grand".

Tomb of Maussollos, Mausoleum of Maussollos or Mausoleum of Halicarnassus (in Greek, Μαυσωλεῖον Ἁλικαρνασσεύς, Μαυσωλεῖον τοῦ Ἁλικαρνασσοῦ (Ἀλικαρνασσοῦ)) was a tomb built between 353 and 350 BC at Halicarnassus (present Bodrum, Turkey) for Mausolus — a satrap in the Persian Empire — and Artemisia II of Caria, his wife and sister. The structure was designed by the Greek architects Satyrus and Pythius.It stood approximately 45 meters (135 feet) in height, and each of the four sides was adorned with sculptural reliefs created by each one of four Greek sculptors — Leochares, Bryaxis, Scopas of Paros and Timotheus.^[3] The finished structure was considered to be such an aesthetic triumph that Antipater of Sidon identified it as one of his Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The word mausoleum has since come to be used generically for any grand tomb, though "Mausol – eion" originally meant "[building] dedicated to Mausolus".






The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
Near present day Al Hillah in Iraq

The Greek Historian Diodorus:

"The Garden was 100 feet long by 100 feet wide and built up in tiers so that it resembled a theater. Vaults had been constructed under the ascending terraces which carried the entire weight of the planted garden; the uppermost vault, which was seventy-five feet high, was the highest part of the garden, which, at this point, was on the same level as the city walls. The roofs of the vaults which supported the garden were constructed of stone beams some sixteen feet long, and over these were laid first a layer of reeds set in thick tar, then two courses of baked brick bonded by cement, and finally a covering of lead to prevent the moisture in the soil penetrating the roof. On top of this roof enough topsoil was heaped to allow the biggest trees to take root. The earth was leveled off and thickly planted with every kind of tree. And since the galleries projected one beyond the other, where they were sunlit, they contained conduits for the water which was raised by pumps in great abundance from the river, though no one outside could see it being done."

Source: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia

The Most Gifted Man Who Ever Lived

He could draw a leaf or a hand, a fern or a rock, in ways miraculous to behold. No one ever matched his renditions of light and shade, or his genius for investing a flat surface with a scene of haunting mystery. Yet, for Leonardo Da Vinci - creator of the "Mona Lisa," and "The Last Supper" - artistic greatness was but one of his incredible endowments.
Leonardo Da Vinci was bewitched by everything: a baby's smile, birds in flight, the pageant of the planets. He loved the human face and form, and sketched an absorbing gallery of warriors, crones, old men - and bodies with the skin peeled off to reveal the architecture of ligaments and muscles.

But Leonardo was far, far more than an artist. He was an engineer, a musician, an architect, a cartographer, a mathematician. He was an astronomer, a botanist, a zoologist, a geologist, a physiologist. He was the first man to make wax impressions of the brains interior, to consider using glass or ceramic models so that the workings of the heart and eye could be understood. He was the first to draw an accurate representation of an opened womb (with an embryo inside) and the first to investigate why leaves are arranged the way they are around a stem.

In one of his many notebooks he drew a male figure in a square inside a circle, the legs together, then set apart, the arms horizontal, then at a 45-degree angle. "The span of a man's outstretched arms is equal to his height," he revealed. "The center of the circle formed by the extremities of the outstretched limbs will be the navel. The space between the legs...will form an equilateral triangle.

He was the first modern thinker and scientist, for he sought to discover the causes of things by direct observation and experiment - not, as did most 15th-century seers, in the words of Holy Writ, Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas. Science, he contended, is "the knowledge of all things taht are possible," and he was obsessed by what he called "saper vedere" (knowing how to see).

One of the most remarkable things about Leonardo is that he assumed he was able to understand anything. The entire universe, from the wings of a dragonfly to the birth of the earth itself was the playground for his deft intelligence.

Before Copernicus, he noted that the sun does not move around the earth and the the earth is a "star, like the moon." Before Galileo, he said falling objects falling objects accelerate their speed with distance, and suggested that "a large magnifying lens" should be used to study the surface of the moon. He was a pioneer in optics, in hydraulics, in the physics of sound and the nature of light. Sound moves in waves, he noted - which is why two church bells, one farther away than the other, struck simultaneously, are heard separately. and, noting a lag between a flash of lightning and a thunderclap, he concluded that light must travel faster than sound. In his investigations into the circulation of blood, he was able to describe arteriosclerosis, which he attributed to lack of exercise!

Four centuries before Darwin, Leonardo ventured this heretical thought: "Man does not vary from the animals except in what is accidental." He declared that the rings in the trunk of a tree record the years of its growth - and the annual moisture.

Nor is that all. Long before the Industrial Revolution, in a world that did not even have a screwdrivers, he created a monkey wrench, ratchets, jacks, winches, a lathe, and a crane that could lift an entire church. He designed a piston that moved by steam pressure and a sprocket chain with a round-toothed gear that would not slip. He invented a differential transmission that permitted a cart to take a curve with the inside wheel moving more slowly than the outside wheel.

He drew innumerable varieties of pulleys, springs, portable bridges, double-deck streets; a device to measure changes in the weather; an automatic "feed" for printing. He invented roller bearings and a scissors that opened and closed with one hand movement; also air-inflated skis - for walking on water.

He was the first man to recommend that air be harnessed a as source of power. He described an internal-combustion engine, an air-conditioning device, an odometer, a hygrometer. He even enumerated the cost benefits of mass production.

This supreme artist, who called war "a bestial madness," served as military engineer for Cesare Borgia. He invented a machine gun, the tank, the submarine. He created a frogman's diving suit, the snorkel, a warship with a double hull. (It could stay afloat after the outside hull was hit.)

He was forever fascinated by water: in ocean tides and waterfalls, breaking against the rocks, in a quiet pool, a stream, a river. He described things no one else had observed before: that the surface of a pond is moved by wind, yet the bottom remains still; that rivers run faster near the surface than they do near the bottom; that water never moves of its own volition except when it descends. He designed and supervised the buildings of canals all around the city of Milan, a feat still praised by engineers.

In no field was Leonardo more bold and original than aerodynamics: "A bird works according to mathematical law, which it is within the power of man to reproduce." He set caged birds free to study their takeoff, lift, wingspread. His eyesight was phenomenal, for he saw and drew things that were simply not visible to most men - until high speed photography "froze" motion.

In the 15th century, he invented the glider. and the parachute. And the helicopter. He described the value of retractable landing gears and wheels...

Leonardo was born in Vinci, near Florence, in 1452, the illegitimate son of a notary and a peasant girl. He was raised by his father and paternal grandfather. At an early age he showed extraordinary curiosity and exceptional skill in music, geometry and drawing. At 15, he was apprenticed to the famous painter Verrocchio, whom he astounded with his masterful draftsmanship and the luminous beauty of his painting.

"He was tall, graceful, very strong," raved contemporary artist Giorgio Vasari. He was also a fine fencer and a superb horseman. He improvised poetry, which he sang in a melodious voice to the accompaniment of a lute he himself had fashioned. By the time he was 28, Leonardo was acknowledged to be the greatest painter of his time - a period that included Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli.

But there was a dark, secretive side to Leonardo. He was restless and moody and feared crowds. He was never satisfied with his work forever blaming himself for not undertaking enough, yet breaking off commission after commission to begin some new, glittering project - which in turn remained uncompleted. "I wish to work miracles," he had written in his youth; later he often lamented having "wasted" so many days of his life.

Leonardo's famous notebook were a potpourri of pages of various sizes, left unstitched, or bound in small batches. His spelling was as wayward as his grammar - and he taught himself to write backward in what appeared to be a special code. Some 6000 pages have been discovered in collections all over Europe. They are surely the most remarkable record of creativity ever produced by one human being.

Leonardo died near Amboise, France, while at the court of Francis I. He was 67, a ripe old age in that distant day.

No one can explain him. "Genius" does scant justice to the phenomenal range and originality of his work. There is no name, from all history, to place alongside his. Put most simply, Leonardo da Vinci remains the most gifted human being who ever lived.

Author: Leo Rosten

John Everett Millais

The Boyhood of Raleigh by John Everett Millais

Blind Girl By John Everett Millais

John Everett Millais
Photograph of Millais
Born	June 8, 1829(1829-06-08) Southampton, England
Died	August 13, 1896 (aged 67) London
Nationality	English
Field	Painting, Drawing, Printmaking
Training	Royal Academy of Art
Movement	Pre-Raphaelite
Famous works	Ophelia; Christ In The House Of His Parents; A Huguenot.

Jane Austen

Jane Austen

Born: 16-Dec-1775
Birthplace: Steventon, Hampshire, England
Died: 18-Jul-1817
Location of death: Winchester, England
Cause of death: unspecified
Remains: Buried, Winchester Cathedral

Gender: Female
Race or Ethnicity: White
Occupation: Author

Nationality: England
Executive summary: Pride and Prejudice

English novelist, born on the 16th of December 1775 at the parsonage of Steventon, in Hampshire, a village of which her father, the Rev. George Austen, was rector. She was the youngest of seven children. Her mother was Cassandra Leigh, niece of Theophilus Leigh, a dry humorist, and for fifty years master of Balliol, Oxford. The life of no woman of genius could have been more uneventful than Miss Austen's. She did not marry, and she never left home except on short visits, chiefly to Bath. Her first sixteen years were spent in the rectory at Steventon, where she began early to trifle with her pen, always jestingly, for family entertainment. In 1801 the Austens moved to Bath, where Mr. Austen died in 1805, leaving only Mrs. Austen, Jane and her sister Cassandra, to whom she was always deeply attached, to keep up the home; his sons were out in the world, the two in the navy, Francis William and Charles, subsequently rising to admiral's rank. In 1805 the Austen ladies moved to Southampton, and in 1809 to Chawton, near Alton, in Hampshire, and there Jane Austen remained until 1817, the year of her death, which occurred at Winchester, on July 18th, as a memorial window in the cathedral testifies.

During her placid life Miss Austen never allowed her literary work to interfere with her domestic duties: sewing much and admirably, keeping house, writing many letters and reading aloud. Though, however, her days were quiet and her area circumscribed, she saw enough of middle-class provincial society to find a basis on which her dramatic and humorous faculties might build, and such was her power of searching observation and her sympathetic imagination that there are not in English fiction more faithful representations of the life she knew than we possess in her novels. She had no predecessors in this genre. Miss Austen's "little bit (two inches wide) of ivory" on which she worked "with so fine a brush" -- her own phrases -- was her own invention.

Her best known, if not her best work, Pride and Prejudice, was also her first. It was written between October 1796 and August 1797, although, such was the blindness of publishers, not issued until 1813, two years after Sense and Sensibility, which was written, on an old scenario called "Eleanor and Marianne", in 1797 and 1798. Miss Austen's inability to find a publisher for these stories, and for Northanger Abbey, written in 1798 (although it is true that she sold that manuscript in 1803 for £10 to a Bath bookseller, only, however, to see it locked away in a safe for some years, to be gladly resold to her later), seems to have damped her ardor; for there is no evidence that between 1798 and 1809 she wrote anything but the fragment called "The Watsons", after which year she began to revise her early work for the press. Her other three books belong to a later date -- Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion being written between 1811 and 1816. All her works were initially anonymous, agreeably to their author's retiring disposition.

Although Pride and Prejudice is the novel which in the mind of the public is most intimately associated with Miss Austen's name, both Mansfield Park and Emma are finer achievements -- at once riper and richer and more elaborate. But the fact that Pride and Prejudice is more single-minded, that the love story of Elizabeth Bennet and D'Arcy is not only of the book but is the book (whereas the love story of Emma and Mr. Knightley and Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram have parallel streams), has given Pride and Prejudice its popularity above the others among readers who are more interested by the course of romance than by the exposition of character. Entirely satisfactory as is Pride and Prejudice so far as it goes, it is, however, thin beside the niceness of analysis of motives in Emma and the wonderful management of two housefuls of young lovers that is exhibited in Mansfield Park.

It has been generally agreed by the best critics that Miss Austen has never been approached in her own domain. No one indeed has attempted any close rivalry. No other novelist has so concerned herself or himself with the trivial daily comedy of small provincial family life, disdaining equally the assistance offered by passion, crime and religion. Whatever Miss Austen may have thought privately of these favorite ingredients of fiction, she disregarded all alike when she took her pen in hand. Her interest was in life's little perplexities of emotion and conduct; her gaze was steadily ironical. The most untoward event in any of her books is Louisa's fall from the Cobb at Lyme Regis, in Persuasion; the most abandoned, Maria's elopement with Crawford, in Mansfield Park. In pure ironical humour Miss Austen's only peer among novelists is George Meredith, and indeed Emma may be said to be her Egoist, or the Egoist his Emma. But irony and fidelity to the fact alone would not have carried her down the ages. To these gifts she allied a perfect sense of dramatic progression and an admirably lucid and flowing prose style which makes her stories the easiest reading.

Recognition came to Miss Austen slowly. It was not until many decades later that to read her became a necessity of culture. But she is now firmly established as an English classic, standing far above Miss Burney (Madame d'Arblay) and Maria Edgeworth, who in her day were the popular women novelists of real life, while Mrs. Radcliffe and "Monk" Lewis, whose supernatural fancies Northanger Abbey was written in part to ridicule, are no longer anything but names. Although much delayed in her fame, Miss Austen had always her panegyrists among the best intellects -- such as Coleridge, Tennyson, Macaulay, Scott, Sydney Smith, Disraeli and Archbishop Whately, the last of whom may be said to have been her discoverer. Macaulay, whose adoration of Miss Austen's genius was almost idolatrous, considered Mansfield Park her greatest feat; but many critics give the palm to Emma. Disraeli read Pride and Prejudice seventeen times. Scott's testimony is often quoted: "That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements, feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I have ever met with. The big bow-wow I can do myself like any one going; but the exquisite touch which renders commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me."

Father: Rev. George Austen (clergyman, b. 1731, d. Jan-1805)
Mother: Cassandra Leigh (b. 1739, d. 1827)
Brother: Frank
Brother: Charles
Sister: Cassandra
Brother: Edward
Brother: Henry
Boyfriend: Harris Bigg-Wither (broken engagement)

Is the subject of books:
A Portrait of Jane Austen, 1978, BY: David Cecil

Author of books:
Sense and Sensibility (1811, novel)
Pride and Prejudice (1813, novel)
Mansfield Park (1814, novel)
Emma (1816, novel)
Northanger Abbey (1818, novel, posthumous)
Persuasion (1818, novel, posthumous)

The Classics Revisited

Welcome to my blogspot. Herein I will take you with me to my journeys through the classics...i.e classic arts, novels, poems, books, authors, paintings, drawings and antiquities. Life is like a winding road leading to other roads, small or significant. Through our journey along life's road we must be equipped with the best weapons to ward off anything that will hinder us from pursuing our course towards our destination. The classics are timeless reminders from great thinkers and masters who through their works give us lasting legacies on life's principles that we can carry with us all through the next generations. For a start I share with you some thoughts from the novels of classical authors...

"Pride is a very common failing I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed, that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who did not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or the other, real or imaginary. Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person maybe proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us."
From Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen


"You have a good many little gifts and virtues, but there is no need of parading them, for conceit spoils the finest genius. There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will be overlooked long; even if it is, the consciousness of possessing and using it well should satisfy one, and the great charm of all power is modesty."~~Louisa May Alcott, 'Little Women'.

"I hold another creed, which no one ever taught me, and which I seldom mention, but in which I delight, and to which I cling, for it extends hope to all; it makes eternity a rest--a mighty home--not a terror and an abyss. Besides, with this creed, I can so clearly distinguish between the criminal and his crime, I can so sincerely forgive the first while I abhor the last; with this creed, revenge never worries my heart, degradation never too deeply disgusts me, injustice never crushes me too low; I live in calm, looking to the end."~~Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

These and many more in my next blog journey...