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Prejudices, Second Series (Classic Reprint)
Prejudices Second Series - Classic Reprint Author:H. L. Mencken IT is convenient to begin, like the gentlemen of God, with a glance at a text or two. The first, a short one, is from Ralph Waldo Emerson's celebrated oration, "The American Scholar," delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge on August 31st, 1837. Emerson was then thirty-four years old and almost unknown in his own country, though... more » he had already published "Nature" and established his first contacts with Landor and Carlyle. But "The American Scholar" brought him into instant notice at home, partly as man of letters but more importantly as seer and prophet, and the fame thus founded has endured without much diminution, at all events in New England, to this day. Oliver Wendell Holmes, giving words to What was undoubtedly the common feeling, hailed the address as the intellectual declaration of independence of the American people, and. that judgment, amiably passed on by three generations of pedagogues, still survives in the 'literature books. I quote from the firs
Table of Contents
I The National Letters, 9; 1 Prophets and Their Visions, 9; 2 The Answering Fact, 14; 3 The Ashes of New England, 18; 4 The Ferment Underground, 25; 5 In the Literary Abattoir, 32; 6 Underlying Causes, 39; 7 The Lonesome Artist, 54; 8 The Cultural Background, 65; 9 Under the Campus Pump, 78; 10 The Intolerable Burden, 87; 11 Epilogue, 98; II Roosevelt: an Autopsy, 102; III The Sahara of the Bozart, 136; IV The Divine Afflatus, 155; V Scientific Examination of a Popular Virtue, 172 VI Exeunt Omnes, 180; VII The Allied Arts, 194; 1 On Music-Lovers, 194; 2 Opera, 197; 3 The Music of To-morrow, 201; 4 Tempo di Valse, 204; 5 The Puritan as Artist, 206; 6 The Human Face, 206; 7 The Cerebral Mime, 208; VIII The Cult of Hope, 211; IX The Dry Millennium, 219; 1 The Holy War, 219; 2 The Lure of Babylon, 222; 3 Cupid and Well-Water, 225; 4 The Triumph of Idealism, 226; X Appendix on a Tender Theme, 229; 1 The Nature of Love, 229;« less