The Brotherhood of Letters (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1889 Excerpt: ... iv. SOLITUDE AND SOCIETY; AND THE DEBATABLE LAND BETWEEN. "But when an eager listener, stealing behind Irving and Halleck at an evening party, found them talking of shoe-leather and a breathless devotee of Thackeray, sitting opposite to him at the dinner-table, saw those Delphian lips unclosed only to utter the words, 'Another potato, if you please t--they had revelations which might cast a dreadful suspicion over the nature of the whole tribe of authors. "I would not have the reader imagine that the members of the Echo Club are represented by either of these extremes. They are authors, of different ages and very unequal places in public estimation. It would never occur to them to seat themselves on selfconstructed pyramids, and speak as if The Ages were listening; yet, like their brethren of all lands and all times, the staple of their talk is literature."--Bayard Taylor. The hunger of a great and selfsufficing mind for the charms of retirement is sometimes pathetic in the extreme. We do not refer here to that romantic longing of poetic boyhood, such as we find expressed by Kirke White in one of his sonnets: and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness and all the thousand bitters." "Give me a cottage on some Cambrian wild, Where, far from cities, I may spend my days: And by the beauties of the scene beguiled, May pity man's pursuits, and shun his ways. While on the rock I mark the browsing goat, List to the mountain torrent's distant noise, Or the hoarse bittern's solitary note, I shall not want the world's delusive joys; But, with my little scrip, my book, my lyre, Shall th...