J. C. Shairp

Anticipatory

Here is an anticipatory glance of what was to be.

Architectonic

These architectonic functions which we had hitherto thought belonged.

Condone

It would have been magnanimous in the men then in power to have overlooked all these things, and, condoning the politics, to have rewarded the poetry of Burns.

Culture

What the Greeks expressed by their paidei`a, the Romans by their humanitas, we less happily try to express by the more artificial word culture.

Dabble

During the first year at Dumfries, Burns for the first time began to dabble in politics.

Delilah

Other Delilahs on a smaller scale Burns met with during his Dumfries sojourn.

Dilettante

The true poet is not an eccentric creature, not a mere artist living only for art, not a dreamer or a dilettante, sipping the nectar of existence, while he keeps aloof from its deeper interests.

Divisive

It [culture] is after all a dainty and divisive quality, and can not reach to the depths of humanity.

Domain

The domain over which the poetic spirit ranges.

Dream

It is not them a mere dream, but a very real aim which they propose.

Dry

The scientific man must keep his feelings under stern control, lest they obtrude into his researches, and color the dry light in which alone science desires to see its objects.

Dumb

To pierce into the dumb past.

Dwarf

Even the most common moral ideas and affections . . . would be stunted and dwarfed, if cut off from a spiritual background.

Early

The earliest poem he composed was in his seventeenth summer.

Economic

These matters economical and political.

Effect

Patchwork . . . introduced for oratorical effect.

Energize

Of all men it is true that they feel and energize first, they reflect and judge afterwards.

Epoch

The long geological epoch which stored up the vast coal measures.

Essay

A danger lest the young enthusiast . . . should essay the impossible.

Estimate

It is always very difficult to estimate the age in which you are living.

Weigh success in a moral balance, and our whole estimate is changed.

Estrangement

An estrangement from God.

Ethereality

Something of that ethereality of thought and manner which belonged to Wordsworth's earlier lyrics.

Evolve

Not by any power evolved from man's own resources, but by a power which descended from above.

Filigree

You ask for reality, not fiction and filigree work.

Forefront

Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, standing in the forefront for all time, the masters of those who know.

Harness

Harnessed to some regular profession.

Heat

[He] struck off at one heat the matchless tale of “Tam o' Shanter.”

Jacobinism

Under this new stimulus, Burn's previous Jacobitism passed towards the opposite, but not very distant, extreme of Jacobinism.

Lilt

The housewife went about her work, or spun at her wheel, with a lilt upon her lips.

Lowlily

Thinking lowlily of himself and highly of those better than himself.

Mellow

The fervor of early feeling is tempered and mellowed by the ripeness of age.

Melt

The soft, green, rounded hills, with their flowing outlines, overlapping and melting into each other.

Outcome

All true literature, all genuine poetry, is the direct outcome, the condensed essence, of actual life and thought.

Rightness

The craving for rightness with God.

Roup

To roup, that is, the sale of his crops, was over.

Soap

This soap bubble of the metaphysicians.

Solemnize

Wordsworth was solemnizzed and elevated by this his first look on Yarrow.

Stereotyped

Our civilization, with its stereotyped ways and smooth conventionalities.

Ventilate

Macaulay took occasion to ventilate one of those startling, but not very profound, paradoxes.