Partial Portraits
Book Description
General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1888 Original Publisher: Macmillan Subjects: Authors Fiction Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a mill...
MoreGeneral Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1888 Original Publisher: Macmillan Subjects: Authors Fiction Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: EMERSON Mr. Elliot Cabot has made a very interesting contribution to a class of books of which our literature, more than any other, offers admirable examples: he has given us a biographyl intelligently and carefully composed. These two volumes are a model of responsible editing -- I use that term because they consist largely of letters and extracts from letters: nothing could resemble less the manner in which the mere bookmaker strings together his frequently questionable pearls and shovels the heap into the presence of the public. Mr. Cabot has selected, compared, discriminated, steered an even course between meagreness and redundancy, and managed to be constantly and happily illustrative. And his work, moreover, strikes us as the better done from the fact that it stands for one of the two things that make an absorbing memoir a good deal more than for the other. If these two things be the conscience of the writer and the career of his hero, it is not 1 A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson; by James Elliot Cabot. Two volumes : London, 1887. difficult to see on which side the biographer of Emerson has found himself strongest. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a man of genius, but he led for nearly eighty years a life in which the sequence of events had little of the rapidity, or the complexity, that a spectator loves. There is something we miss very much as we turn these pages -- something that has a kind of accidental, inevitable presence in almost any personal record -- something that may be most definitely indicated under the name of colour. We lay down th...
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