Excerpt from The American Mind and American IdealismAn editorial in tit Springfield Republican points out that the low standard of American writing is due, not to any lack of technical training, but to minds made flabby by "soft" courses and "lazy trifling with current fiction." Given minds of this sort, no amount of technical discipline will produce good writing, for, "important as it is, and to be encouraged in every way, formal instruction in the art of writing must always be secondary to education for wide culture and vigorous thinking. Good writing is mainly a matter of robust intellectual appetite and digestion employed upon matters that produce self-expression." With the hope that this intellectual spirit may, to some extent, be cultivated by the study of virile modern writers, these Riverside Essays have been selected.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.