thomas and jane: those absorbing tragicomedies
Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh Carlyle…. It was a disastrous marriage- that is, at least, the conclusion we draw from the Carlyle’s letters. James Anthony Froude, a close friend and the authorof a four...
View Articlejoan : weigh the small advance, there is still a chance
The Monarchist movement, the romantic movement, the spiritualist movement, the liberation movement, the communist movement; Joan of Arc has passed through all of them wit the ease and aplomb that one...
View Articlebattle never done
John Lukacs once made the rather pessimistic observation that had Hitler succeeded in subduing England and conquering the Island, the English would have acted with the same dynamic of complicity and...
View Articlethe almighty is not interested in creating paintings
Andre Malraux’s Metamorphosis of the Gods and the making of the personal deity for an agnostic secular society. After the Enlightenment, the Gods engaged in popular bourgeois culture. us and them...
View Articlethoreau: letting his garden grow
Finding a wilderness at Walden and time to develop a sturdy individualist’s philosophy… …But most mornings he devoted to his garden. His bean rows added up to more than seven miles in length and...
View Articlethoreau: free time for first draft
…A good part of Thoreau’s new-found free time he was able to devote to writing. The first work he completed at the pond was an extended essay on Thomas Carlyle. As early as 1842 he had begun making...
View Articlethoreau: meanwhile back at the pond
…Meanwhile, Thoreau had not forgotten that one of his purposes in coming to Walden was to write another book, the account of his voyage on the Concord and Merrimack. Work on this, too, had progressed...
View Articlethoreau: the ice men
…He became fascinated with the phenomena of the pond. In the spring of 1846, before the ice broke up, he surveyed carefully the size and depth of the pond. He cut holes in the ice and charted his...
View Articlethoreau: ways with the wild
…Thoreau’s way with wildlife continually astonished his visitors. Mrs. Edwin Bigelow once said of him: Henry would tell all to sit absolutely quiet and close together- then he would go forward...
View Articlekarl marx: romanticism of the angry moralist
The many faces of Karl Marx. We know of the revolutionary, the prophet, the historian and the philosopher. But he had one another: the romantic idealist exhorting man to triumph over the things he...
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