Two Commencement Addresses

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Harvard University Press, 1915 - Books and reading - 44 pages
 

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Page 44 - And yet on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man, as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image : but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.
Page 43 - Camerado, this is no book, Who touches this touches a man, (Is it night? are we here together alone?) It is I you hold and who holds you, I spring from the pages into your arms— decease calls me forth.
Page 37 - ... haec studia adolescentiam alunt, senectutem oblectant, secundas res ornant, adversis perfugium ac solatium praebent, 'delectant domi, non impediunt foris, pernoctant nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticantur.
Page 27 - They knew not of his story, And sage Hippotades their answer brings, That not a blast was from his dungeon strayed, The air was calm, and on the level brine Sleek Panope with all her sisters played. It was that fatal and perfidious bark Built in th' eclipse, and rigged with curses dark, That sunk so low that sacred head of thine.
Page 43 - For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are ; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.
Page 42 - LET me leave the plains behind, And let me leave the vales below ! Into the highlands of the mind, Into the mountains let me go.
Page 43 - ... nay, they do preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively and as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and, being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.
Page 17 - For the essence of humanism is that one belief of which he seems never to have doubted, that nothing which has ever interested living men and women can wholly lose its vitality — no language they have spoken nor oracle by which they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once been entertained by actual human minds, nothing about which they have ever been passionate or expended time and zeal, (pp.
Page 40 - the true university of these days is a collection of books.
Page 42 - In arbours and in pleasances. Here are the heights, crest beyond crest, With Himalayan dews impearled ; And I will watch from Everest The long heave of the surging world.

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