9780217711951

Essays

Format: Paperback

ISBN13: 9780217711951

Paperback|9780217711951


Overview

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: POCKET-BOOKS AND KEEPSAKES. If publications of this nature proceed as they have begun, we shall soon arrive at the millennium of souvenirs. Instead of engravings, we shall have paintings by the first masters; our paper must be vellum; our bindings in opal and amethyst; and nobody must read us except in a room full of luxury, or a bower of roses. As to the proprietor of the work, he will not condescend to be wholesale. He will take up the trade of Keepsakes exclusively; and Pitt diamonds are not to be sold by the lump. The purchaser will bring a casket for his duodecimo, and deposit a gem. The reader knows that splendid passage in Marlowe, where the rich Jew of Malta, standing amongst his treasures, and scorning his more vulgar gains, riots in contemplation of the mighy concentrated wealth of his rubies and emeralds. The lines tell, one by one, as if they were diamonds them-, selves. The fellow cuts them, as out of a quarry, with a pleasure amounting to the austere; and, with the same easy sternness and severity of gusto, piles them monotonously before us, insolently magnificent. He should have been a proprietor of pocket-books. As for those Samnites, and the men of Uzz, That bought my Spanish oils and wines of Greece, Here have I pursed their paltry silverlings. Fie what a trouble 'tis to count this trash Give me the merchants of the Indian mines That trade in metal of the purest gold; The wealthy Moor, that in the eastern rocks Without control can pick his riches up, And in his house keep pearls like pebble stones; Receive them free, and sell them by the weight; Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts, Jacinths, hard topas, grass-green emeralds, Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds, And seld-seen costly stones of so great price, As one of them, indifferently rat...

ISBN-13

9780217711951

ISBN-10

0217711952

Weight

0.81 Pounds

Dimensions

9.00 x 6.00 x 0.56 In

List Price

$18.81

Format

Paperback

Pages

246 pages

Publisher

Published On

2009-08-01



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