- Performer Name:
- Performance Venue:
- Performance Date:
- Author:
- Carlyle, Thomas
- Date Written:
- Language:
- English
- Publication Title:
- Foreign Review, and Continental Miscellany
- Article Title:
- Novalis
- Page Numbers:
- 4:97-98
- Additional Info:
- Publisher:
- Black, Young, and Young
- Place of Publication:
- London
- Date Published:
- 1829
Text:
[97] [On books that don't require much time and effort from the reader:] Not as if we meant, by this remark, to cast a stone at the old guild of literary Improvisators, or any of that diligent brotherhood, whose trade it is to blow soap-bubbles for their fellow-creatures; which bubbles, of course, if they are not seen and admired this moment, will be altogether lost to men's eyes the next.
[98] […] We do say therefore that the Improvisator corporation should be kept within limits; and readers, at least a certain small class of readers, should understand that some few small departments of human inquiry still have their depths and difficulties; that the abstruse is not precisely synonymous with the absurd; nay that light itself may be darkness, in a certain state of the eyesight; that, in short, cases may occur when a little patience and some attempt at thought would not be altogether superfluous in reading.
Notes:
- Collected by:
- AE