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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. 1908 Excerpt: ...to Allston and Claude Lorraine. We now learn the name of the tenant of the cottage, which is Wilton, and ascertain that he has an only daughter. A single stanza quoted at this juncture will aid the reader's conception of the queer tone of philosophical rhapsody with which the poem teems, and some specimen of which is invariably made to follow each little modicum of incident: How like the heart is to an instrument A touch can wake to gladness or to woe! How like the circumambient element The spirit with its undulating flow! The heart--the soul--O Mother Nature, why This universal bond of sympathy? After two pages much in this manner, we are told that Geraldine is the name of the maiden, and are informed, with comparatively little circumlocu-tion, of her character. She is beautiful and kind-hearted, and somewhat romantic, and "some.thought her reason touched," for which we have little dis-position to blame them. There is now much about Kant and Fichte; about Schelling, Hegel, and Cousin (which last is made to rhyme with "gang"); about Milton, Byron, Homer, Spinoza, David Hume, and Mirabeau; and a good deal, too, about the scribendi cacoethes, in which an evident misunderstanding of the quanity of cacoSthes brings, again, into very dis-agreeable suspicion the writer's cognizance of the Latin tongue. At this point we may refer, also, to such absurdities as n u and Truth with her thousand-folded robe of error Close shut in her sarcophagi of terror, Where candelabri silver the white walls. Now, no one is presupposed to be cognizant of any language beyond his own; to be ignorant of Latin is no crime; to pretend a knowledge is beneath contempt; and the pretender will attempt in vain to utter or to write two consecutive phrases of a foreign idiom...