November Boughs (Paperback)

General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1888 Original Publisher: D. McKay Subjects: Literary Criticism / General History / General Literary Collections / General Literary Criticism / General Literary Criticism / American / General Literary Criticism / Poetry 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: OUR EMINENT VISITORS PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE. Welcome to them each and all They do good -- the deepest, widest, most needed good -- though quite certainly not in the ways attempted -- which have, at times, something irresistibly comic. What can be more farcical, for instance, than the sight of a worthy gentleman coming three or four thousand miles through wet and wind to speak complacently and at great length on matters of which he both entirely mistakes or knows nothing -- before crowds of auditors equally complacent, and equally at fault? Yet welcome and thanks, we say, to those visitors we have, and have had, from abroad among us -- and may the procession continue We have had Dickens and Thackeray, Froude, Herbert Spencer, Oscar Wilde, Lord Coleridge -- soldiers, savants, poets -- and now Matthew Arnold and Irving the actor. Some have come to make money -- some for a " good time " -- some to help us along and give us advice -- and some undoubtedly to investigate, bona fide, this great problem, democratic America, looming upon the world with such cumulative power through a hundred years, now with the evident intention (since the Secession War) to stay, and take a leading hand, for many a century to come, in civilization's and humanity's eternal game. But alas that very investigation -- the method of that investigation -- is where the deficit most surely and helplessly comes in....