English Hours |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
Abbey admirable afternoon American ancient antiquity arches architectural beautiful Broughton Castle brown Canterbury castle cathedral charming CHESTER CATHEDRAL CHICHESTER CROSS church civilisation colour corner course dark delightful Denis Duval Derby dozen Dunwich dusky empty England English entertainment eyes fact fancy feel garden gentleman Georgian era grassy green Greenwich grey Haddon Hall hour huge Ilfracombe imagination immense impression Kensington Gardens kind lady lawn least less Lichfield LICHFIELD CATHEDRAL light London look Ludlow Castle MAGDALEN TOWER magnificent mediæval memory ment miles ness never one's Park pass perched perhaps picture picturesque rich romantic ruin Salisbury Cathedral scene seemed sense side social sort speak spire stand Stonehenge stranger street striking stroll talk terrace Thackeray things tion towers town vague Ventnor walk walls Warwickshire Winchelsea wonder Wroxton Abbey young
Popular passages
Page 165 - A damp-looking, dirty blackness is the universal tone. The river is almost black, and is covered with black barges; above the black housetops, from among the far-stretching docks and basins, rises a dusky wilderness of masts. The little puffing steamer is dingy and gritty — it belches a sable cloud that keeps you company as you go. In this carboniferous shower your companions, who belong chiefly, indeed, to the classes bereft of lustre, assume an harmonious grayness; and the whole picture, glazed...
Page 38 - Mr. WH Smith's bookstalls — a feature not to be omitted in any enumeration of the charms of Paddington and Euston. It is a focus of warmth and light in the vast smoky cavern ; it gives the idea that literature is a thing of splendour, of a dazzling essence, of infinite gas-lit red and gold.
Page 273 - English have invented and made a part of the credit of the national character, the most perfect, the most characteristic, the...
Page 31 - rookeries," the brutalities, the night-aspect of many of the streets, the gin-shops and the hour when they are cleared out before closing— there are many elements of this kind which have to be counted out before a genial summary can be made. And yet I should not go so far as to say that it is a condition of such geniality to close one's eyes upon the immense misery; on the contrary, I think it is partly because we are irremediably conscious of that dark gulf that the most general appeal of the...
Page 12 - The reader will perceive that I do not shrink even from the extreme concession of speaking of our capital as British, and this in a shameless connection with the question of loyalty on the part of an adoptive son. For I hasten to explain that if half the source of one's interest in...
Page 65 - American eyes, accustomed to our eternal straight lines and right angles, is the striking feature of European street scenery. An American strolling in the Chester streets finds a perfect feast of crookedness — of those random corners, projections and recesses, odd domestic interspaces charmingly saved or lost, those innumerable architectural surprises and caprices and fantasies which lead to such refreshing exercise a vision benumbed by brown-stone fronts. An American is born to the idea that on...
Page 73 - Conservatism has the cathedrals, the colleges, the castles, the gardens, the traditions, the associations, the fine names, the better manners, the poetry; Dissent has the dusky brick chapels in provincial by-streets, the names out of Dickens, the uncertain tenure of the h, and the poor mens sibi conscia recti.
Page 14 - For a man of letters who endeavours to cultivate, however modestly, the medium of Shakespeare and Milton, of Hawthorne and Emerson, who cherishes the notion of what it has achieved and what it may even yet achieve, London must ever have a great illustrative and suggestive value, and indeed a kind of sanctity. It is the single place in which most readers, most possible lovers, are gathered together; it is the most inclusive public largest social incarnation of the language, of the tradition.
Page 235 - ... six hundred years. You seem yourself to have hollowed the flags with your tread and to have polished the oak with your touch. You walk along the little stone gallery where the monks used to pace, looking out of the gothic...
Page 26 - She heeds little what she takes, so long as she has her stint, and the smallest push to the right or the left will divert her wavering bulk from one form of prey to another. It is not to be denied that the heart tends to grow hard in her company; but she is a capital antidote to the morbid, and to live with her successfully is an education of the temper, a consecration of one's private philosophy.