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. 1856 Excerpt: ... powers; when the spring-tide of youth fell back, his inward life was as it had been, only that all was stronger and riper. He was a reflective, old-fashioned, calmly-imaginative child, always fascinated by a mystery, but never, properly speaking, awed by it. It kindled his imagination; it never subdued him. He was ...
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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. 1856 Excerpt: ... powers; when the spring-tide of youth fell back, his inward life was as it had been, only that all was stronger and riper. He was a reflective, old-fashioned, calmly-imaginative child, always fascinated by a mystery, but never, properly speaking, awed by it. It kindled his imagination; it never subdued him. He was full of wonder, and quite without veneration. In the "altar to the Lord" which the child secretly built on a music-stand of his father's at seven years of age, and on which he burnt incense in the shape of a pastil, until he found that it was at the risk of injuring his altar, he was innocently playing with a subject which to almost any other child would have been too sacred for imaginative amusement. He was evidently charmed with the picturesqueness of the patriarchal sacrifices, and thought with delight of the blue smoke rising up to heaven beneath the first beam of the rising sun: of the religious feeling, the desire to give up any thing of his own out of love to God, he had not of course any idea;--that in a child of seven no one would expect. But what is characteristic is, the absence of any restraining awe, in thus mingling the thought of God with his play at an age when he had already begun to think whetherder's rather vulgar pun on his name (Gothe), made in college days, "Thou, the descendant of gods, or of Goths, or of gutters," was perhaps a little annoying for the time; but it clearly rankled in his mind; and he mentions it bitterly forty years later, after Herder's death, in the course of a very kindly criticism, as an instance of the sarcasm which rendered Herder often unamiable; characteristically adding this most true principle of etiquette, "the proper name of a man is not like a cloak, which only hangs about h...
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