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27 Cards in this Set
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“It is well known to most of myaudience, that the Idealism of thepresent day acquired the name ofTranscendental, from the use of thatterm by Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg[sic], who replied to the skepticalphilosophy of Locke, which insistedthat there was nothing in theintellect which was notpreviously in the experience ofthe senses, by showing that therewas a very important class of ideas, orimperative forms, which did not comeby experience, but through whichexperience was acquired; that thesewere intuitions of the mind itself; andhe denominated them Transcendentalforms” |
Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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“There I feel that nothing can befal me inlife,--no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving memy eyes,) which nature cannot repair.Standing on the bare ground,--my headbathed by the blithe air, and uplifted intoinfinite space,--all mean egotism vanishes.I became a transparent eye-ball. I amnothing. I see all. The currents of theUniversal Being circulate though me; I ampart of particle of God.” |
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature |
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“In this distribution of functions, the scholaris the delegated intellect. In the right state, heis Man Thinking. In the degenerate state,when the victim of society, he tends tobecome a mere thinker, or still worse, theparrot of other men’s thinking.” |
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar |
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“He then learns that in going down into the secretsof his own mind, he has descended into the secretsof all minds. He learns that he who has masteredany law in his private thoughts, is master to thatextent of all men whose language he speaks, andof all into whose language his own can betranslated. The poet in utter solitude rememberinghis spontaneous thoughts and recording them, isfound to have recorded that which men in ‘citiesvast’ find true for them also” |
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar |
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“I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to haveinherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools. . . . Better ifthey had been born in the open pasture and suckled by awolf” |
Thoreau, Walden |
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“Most men, even in this comparatively free country, throughmere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with thefactitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that itsfiner fruits cannot be plucked by them. . . . [The laboring man]has no time to be any thing but a machine” |
Thoreau, Walden |
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“I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almostsay, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form ofservitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen andsubtle masters that enslave both north and south. It is hard tohave a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; butworst of all when you are the slave-drive of yourself. Talk of thedivinity in man!” |
Thoreau, Walden |
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“Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comfortsof life, are not only not indispensable, but positivehinderances to the elevation of mankind” |
Thoreau, Walden |
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“In the savage state every family owns a shelter as goodas the best, and sufficient for its coarser and simpler wants;but I think that I speak within bounds when I say that,though the birds of the air have their nests, and the foxestheir holes, and the savages their wigwams, in moderncivilized society not more than one half the families own ashelter” |
Thoreau, Walden |
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Alas, I now feel how much even of incipient madness mighthave been discovered in the gorgeous and fantastic draperies,in the solemn carvings of Egypt, in the wild cornices, andfurniture of Arabesque, in the bedlam patterns of the carpets oftufted gold! |
Poe, Ligeia |
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“They want us for their slaves, and think nothing ofmurdering us. . . therefore, if there is an attemptmade by us, kill or be killed. . . and believe this, thatit is no more harm for you to kill a man who is tryingto kill you, than it is for you to take a drink of waterwhen thirsty.” |
David Walker, Appeal in Four Articles |
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“You are confident I did not write the book; and the reason of yourconfidence is, that when you knew me, I was an unlearned andrather an ordinary negro. . . . The degradation to which I was thensubjected, as I now look back to it, seems more like a dream thana horrible reality. . . I can easily understand that you sincerelydoubt if I wrote the narrative; for if any one had told me, sevenyears ago, I should ever be able to write such an one, I shouldhave doubted as strongly as you now do.” |
Douglas, letter to William Lloyd Garrison |
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“I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaningof those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I wasmyself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heardas those without might see and hear. They told a tale ofwoe which was then altogether beyond my feeblecomprehension. To those songs I trace my firstglimmering conception of the dehumanizing characterof slavery” |
Douglas, his autobiography |
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“And now, reader, I come to a period in my unhappy life,which I would gladly forget if I could. . . . It pains me to tell youof it; but I have promised to tell you the truth, let it cost mewhat it may” |
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents |
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“But, O, ye happy women, whose purity has been shelteredfrom childhood, who have been free to choose the objects ofyour affection, whose homes are protected by law, do notjudge the poor desolate slave girl too severely” |
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents |
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“He knew that I could write, though he had failed tomake me read his letters; and he was now troubledlest I should exchange letters with another man. . .One morning . . . he contrived to thrust a note intomy hand. I thought I had better read it, and sparemyself the vexation of having him read it tome” |
Jacobs, Incidents |
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“‘The bill of sale!’ Those words struck me like a blow. So I was sold atlast! A human being sold in the free city of New York! . . . futuregenerations will learn from it that women were articles of traffic inNew York, late in the nineteenth century of the Christianreligion” |
Jacobs, Incidents |
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Sentimental |
Literature that aims to compel a particular emotional response |
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Didactic |
Literature that aims to convey an explicit moral message |
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He griped thefilthy red shirt that clung, stiff with soot, abouthim, and tore it savagely from his arm. Theflesh beneath was muddy with grease andashes” |
Rebecca Davis, Iron Mills |
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“Deborah look in on a city of fires, that burned hot andfiercely in the night. Fire in every possible form: pits offlame waving in the wind; liquid metal-flames writhing intortuous streams through the sand; wide caldrons filledwith boiling fire, over which bent ghastly wretches stirringthe strange brewing; and through all crowds of half-cladmen, looking like revengeful ghosts in the red light. . . Itwas a street in Hell” |
Davis, Iron Mills |
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“Everything was mute and calm;everything gray. . . . The sky seemeda gray surtout. Flights of troubledgray fowl, kith and kin with flights oftroubled gray vapors . . . Shadowspresent, foreshadowing deepershadows to come” |
Melville, Benito Cerino |
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“Once again [Delano] smiled at the phantoms which had mockedhim, and felt something like a tinge of remorse, that, by harboringthem even for a moment, he should, by implication, have betrayed anatheist doubt of the ever-watchful Providence above” |
Melville, Benito Cerino |
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“[Delano’s] attention had been drawn to a slumbering negress, partlydisclosed through the lace-work of some rigging, lying, with youthfullimbs carelessly disposed, under the lee of the bulwarks, like a doe in theshade of a woodland rock. Sprawling at her lapped breasts was herwide-awake fawn, stark naked, its black little body half lifted from thedeck. . . . . But as if not at all concerned at the attitude in which she hadbeen caught, delightedly she caught the child up, with maternaltransports, covering it with kisses. |
Melville, Benito Cerino |
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But the past is passed; why moralize upon it?Forget it. See, yon bright sun has forgotten it all,and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these haveturned over new leaves” |
Melville, Benito Cerino |
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“He had the strangest companionsimaginable; men with long beards, and dressed in linenblouses, and other such new-fangled and ill-fittinggarments; --reformers, temperance-lecturers, and allmanner of cross-looking philanthropits;--community-menand come-outers . . . Who acknolwedged no law andate no solid food, but lived on the scent of otherpeople’s cookery, and turned up their noses at thefare” |
Hawthorne, House of Seven goobles |
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“The greatest possible stumbling-blocks in the path ofhuman happiness and improvement, are these heaps ofbricks, and stones, consolidated with mortar, or hewntimber . . . which men painfully contrive for their owntorment, and call them house and home! The soul needsair” |
Hawthorne, House of Seven Gables |
