Agnes Repplier

“ They bring relief to our spirits, because they savor of nature's "indefatigable renewals." The callous levity of the trenches never offends us when we remember that the jokers are pledged to the great sacrifice. The determined and not too easy cheerfulness of the warring nations is a miracle of courage. We shall have plenty of chance to be courageous along these lines. But the mirth of neutrals is apt to be distasteful when it mocks at the things of war. There is no kindlier essayist than Mr. Simeon Strunsky, no one closer than he to the "simple, humorous, average American man." ”

“ The wind of war has winnowed the chaff from the wheat, and the pleasantness of life is not, at the last analysis, the gift most deeply prized. We have let it go, and gathered to our hearts impelling duties and austerities. ”

“ How can you expect your lame slave to follow his freed thoughts that now have entered into minds more enterprising and courageous than his own. If I teach justice, how shall I prevent some quick-witted young man from doing a just deed which may disturb the business of my master?"
If the personal or social essay—the felicitous study of men and things—has fared ill for the past three years, the critical essay has been well-nigh obliterated. It is certainly easier to read a few pages on commuters' gardens or the perils of precocity than an analysis of Sir Thomas Browne. ”

“ An emancipated spirit is a divine spirit only when it is resolute to brook no evil willingly.
The humors of war are the humors of humanity. They have a body and a substance as real as are the fighting men who jest before they die. ”

“ Through this medium Emerson taught us superbly his austere philosophy. Whether we accept this philosophy or reject it, whether it ignites our souls or chills them, we are equally aware that "great men taken up in any way are profitable companions." The essay was the chosen field in which Mr. Lowell displayed his urbane scholarship, his sanity and wit. Mr. Henry James turned from the despotism of fiction long enough to give us two volumes of essays which Mr. Brownell rightly says, "stand at the head of American literary criticism." ”

“ If the intrusion of a friend into their vast empty house affects them as an unwarranted eruption of Vesuvius might affect a careless dweller on its crest, if they feel that the universe is out of gear when an expressman has left their daily box of flowers at the wrong house, it is because they have come to believe that making themselves superlatively and harmoniously comfortable justifies existence. ”

“ In one of the best of American essays, written nearly thirty years ago, Mr. Henry James says of London, which he loved, but never idealized: "It is not to be denied that the heart tends to grow hard in her company; but she is a capital antidote to the morbid, and to live with her successfully is an education of the temper, a consecration of one's private philosophy."
"One's private philosophy." This is the essayist's birth-right. This is his inheritance from Montaigne, who turned a deaf ear to religious strife, and from Lamb, who looked with seeming unconcern upon Napoleon's downfall. ”

“ Beck, "If I saw the United States going down to defeat, and the cause of civilization perishing, I should still thank God we had the heart to fight"; nor Mr. Roosevelt's strong and straight appeal, "Only by putting honor and duty ahead of safety, shall we stand erect before the world, high of heart, and the masters of our own souls" ”

“ Our fallibility does not release us from the obligation of severing right from wrong—an obligation which is the converging point of Christianity and civilization. In one of the most charming and intimate of early English essays, Cowley speaks this word of wisdom: "God laughs at a man who says to his soul, 'Take thine ease.' "
When a habitually sober thinker dallies with a playful mood, his frivolity is apt to be weighted; but when a habitually humorous thinker grows grave under the stress of a great emotion, his gravity is pointed with wit. ”

“ Perhaps there swept across our minds a vision of the Belgian woman who sees her man standing up to be shot against the old church wall, who knows herself to be the destined spoil of battle, and whose inarticulate cry to Heaven is the call of all suffering creatures to the Creator. ”

“ He admits himself to be a leisure-loving man, whose pleasure it has been to escape from the clamorous present to the peaceful past, to dig into old books, to peer into old churches and school-rooms, to ponder over old theologies. ”

“ A slave, he admits, may be a lofty philosopher, but only a free man can teach the truth: "The teacher does not hold his thought. He releases it. It straightway flies to another mind, and urges it to action. ”

“ The poet is, and has always been, entitled to live in his own world—if he can. Herrick published his "Hesperides" a few months before Charles the First was beheaded, and awakened to the full significance of Puritanism only when the Puritans, who had scant regard for Corinna's May-flowers, or for Julia's pretty furbelows, thrust him from his pleasant vicarage. The essayist has only the common world in which to rejoice or suffer with the men and women who fill it. ”

“ Martin's discerning sentence, "A sincerely religious man may become a great money-maker; but it seems a good deal safer to regard his money-making as something concurrent with his religious duty rather than as the realization of it." ”

“ It is for him to give men correct answers before they are prompted to ask difficult questions. Thus and thus only shall authority be fortressed by intelligence. "Man is a rational animal, and loves to have a reason for what he is compelled to do." ”

“ And Irving, with admirable astuteness, wrote for his readers.
Mr. Owen Wister, whose word it is always well to consider, holds that American essayists are as good as American novelists are bad. Just how much praise is conveyed in this somewhat gloomy comparison, I should not like to say. The notable point in Mr. Wister's criticism is his definition of Washington's Farewell Address and Lincoln's Speech at Gettysburg as belonging, "in their essence, to the family of the essay." ”

“ If we open an index to periodical literature, and see how many columns are headed "European War," we understand why there is no room left for the essay. If we look next at the columns bearing the sub-title, "Atrocities," we know why there is no heart left in the essayist. The college professor could not have written his paper on Sir Thomas Browne after August, 1914.
The submerging of the essay in the "Great Preoccupation" means a heavier loss to English than to American letters, because this "cadet of literature," to borrow Mr. ”

“ He remarks with illuminating candor that the drawback of living with our contemporaries is that they are forever standing around, waiting to do something for us, or have us do something for them. Every human relation involves responsibility ”