CHAPTER I Give me no light, great Heaven, but such as turnsTo energy of human fellowship;No powers beyond the growing heritageThat makes completer manhood. The time of my end approaches. I have lately been subject to attacks of angina pectoris; and in the ordinary course of things, my physician tells me, I may fairly hope […]

Chapter I. TOM MUST GO TO SCHOOL “What I want, you know,” said Mr. Tulliver of Dorlcote Mill–“what I want is to give Tom a good eddication. That was what I was thinking of when I gave notice for him to leave th’ academy at Lady Day. I meant to put him to a downright […]

Fellow-Workmen: I am not going to take up your time by complimenting you. It has been the fashion to compliment kings and other authorities when they have come into power, and to tell them that, under their wise and beneficent rule, happiness would certainly overflow the land. But the end has not always corresponded to […]

[Note: The Grammar of Ornament. By Owen Jones, Architect. Illustrated by Examples from various Styles of Ornament. Onto hundred and twelve plates. Day & Son, London.] The inventor of movable types, says the venerable Teufelsdröckh, was disbanding hired armies, cashiering most kings and senates, and creating a whole new democratic world. Has any one yet […]

[Note: History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe. By W. E. H. Lecky, M.A. Longman & Co., London.] There is a valuable class of books on great subjects which have something of the character and functions of good popular lecturing. They are not original, not subtle, not of close […]

Silly Novels by Lady Novelists are a genus with many species, determined by the particular quality of silliness that predominates in them-the frothy, the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic. But it is a mixture of all these-a composite order of feminine fatuity-that produces the largest class of such novels, which we shall distinguish as […]

{1} It is an interesting branch of psychological observation to note the images that are habitually associated with abstract or collective terms-what may be called the picture-writing of the mind, which it carries on concurrently with the more subtle symbolism of language. Perhaps the fixity or variety of these associated images would furnish a tolerably […]

{1} “Nothing,” says Goethe, “is more significant of men’s character than what they find laughable.” The truth of this observation would perhaps have been more apparent if he had said culture instead of character. The last thing in which the cultivated man can have community with the vulgar is their jocularity; and we can hardly […]

[1] Given, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence and great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and reputation in English society? Where is that Goshen of mediocrity in which […]

[1] In 1847, a certain Count Leopold Ferri died at Padua, leaving a library entirely composed of works written by women, in various languages, and this library amounted to nearly 32,000 volumes. We will not hazard any conjecture as to the proportion of these volumes which a severe judge, like the priest in Don Quixote, […]

As soon as the closing of the Great Exhibition afforded a reasonable hope that there would once more be a reading public, “The Life of Sterling” appeared. A new work by Carlyle must always be among the literary births eagerly chronicled by the journals and greeted by the public. In a book of such parentage […]

O may I join the choir invisibleOf those immortal dead who live againIn minds made better by their presence; liveIn pulses stirred to generosity,In deeds of daring rectitude, in scornOf miserable aims that end with self,In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,And with their mild persistence urge men’s mindsTo vaster issues. So to […]

Dead! one of them shot by the sea in the east,And one of them shot in the west by the sea.Dead! both my boys! When you sit at the feastAnd are wanting a great song for Italy free,Let none look at me ! Yet I was a poetess only last year,And good at my art […]

Three years she grew in sun and shower,Then Nature said, “A lovelier flowerOn earth was never sown;This child I to myself will take,She shall be mine, and I will makeA lady of my own. “Myself will to my darling beBoth law and impulse: and with meThe Girl, in rock and plain,In earth and heaven, in […]

Six hundred years ago, in Dante’s time,Before his cheek was furrowed by deep rhyme;When Europe, fed afresh from Eastern story,Was like a garden tangled with the gloryOf flowers hand-planted and of flowers air-sown,Climbing and trailing, budding and full-blown,Where purple bells are tossed amid pink stars,And springing blades, green troops in innocent wars,Crowd every shady spot […]

CHAPTER I Among the many fatalities attending the bloom of young desire, that of blindly taking to the confectionery line has not, perhaps, been sufficiently considered. How is the son of a British yeoman, who has been fed principally on salt pork and yeast dumplings, to know that there is satiety for the human stomach […]