Biography & Autobiography Books

It was still the Wild West in those days, the Far West, the West of Owen Wister's stories and Frederic Remington's drawings, the West of the Indian and the buffalo-hunter, the soldier and the cowpuncher. That land of the West has gone now, "gone, gone with lost Atlantis," gone to the isle of ghosts and of strange dead memories. It was a land of vast silent spaces, of lonely rivers,... more...

CHAPTER I—INTRODUCTION AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS My little effort to make Thoreau better known in England had one result that I am pleased to think of.  It brought me into personal association with R. L. Stevenson, who had written and published in The Cornhill Magazine an essay on Thoreau, in whom he had for some time taken an interest.  He found in Thoreau not only a rare character for originality,... more...

CHAPTER I HEREDITY AND ANTECEDENTS'These are thy works, O father, these thy crown,Whether on high the air be pure they shineAlong the yellowing sunset, and all nightAmong the unnumbered stars of God they shine.Or whether fogs arise, and far and wideThe low sea-level drown—each finds a tongue,And all night long the tolling bell resounds.So shine so toll till night be overpast,Till the stars... more...

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON When a popular writer dies, the question it has become the fashion with a nervous generation to ask is the question, ‘Will he live?’  There was no idler question, none more hopelessly impossible and unprofitable to answer.  It is one of the many vanities of criticism to promise immortality to the authors that it praises, to patronise a writer with the assurance that our... more...

YOUTH IN AYRSHIRE. Great men, great events, great epochs, it has been said, grow as we recede from them; and the rate at which they grow in the estimation of men is in some sort a measure of their greatness. Tried by this standard, Burns must be great indeed, for during the eighty years that have passed since his death, men's interest in the man himself and their estimate of his genius have been... more...

CHAPTER I. EARLY LIFE.     PARACELSUS. The Boy sprang up ... and ran,Stung by the splendour of a sudden thought.— A Death in the Desert. Dass ich erkenne, was die WeltIm Innersten zusammenhält.— Faust. Judged by his cosmopolitan sympathies and his encyclopædic knowledge, by the scenery and the persons among whom his poetry habitually moves, Browning was one of the least insular of English... more...

King Richard's Mother. 1137-1154Richard the Crusader.A quarrelsome king.King Richard the First, the Crusader, was a boisterous, reckless, and desperate man, and he made a great deal of noise in the world in his day. He began his career very early in life by quarreling with his father. Indeed, his father, his mother, and all his brothers and sisters were engaged, as long as the father lived, in... more...

I. USES OF GREAT MEN. It is natural to believe in great men. If the companions of our childhood should turn out to be heroes, and their condition regal, it would not surprise us. All mythology opens with demigods, and the circumstance is high and poetic; that is, their genius is paramount. In the legends of the Gautama, the first men ate the earth, and found it deliciously sweet. Nature seems to exist... more...

COLORED TROOPS. The circumstances attending the organizing of a colored regiment in this State are well remembered. In the summer of 1863, white men were no longer eager to enlist for a war the end of which none could foresee; but nevertheless the war must be prosecuted with vigor; another draft was impending and the State's quota must be filled. With difficulty Governor Smith obtained permission... more...

TWO YEARS IN THE UNITED STATES NAVY. After having passed an examination before the Medical Board of the United States Navy, which was in session at the United States Naval Asylum, Philadelphia, Pa., Dr. James Green, President of the Medical Board, I received the following appointment: Navy Department, 22d March, 1864. You are hereby appointed Acting Assistant Surgeon in the Navy of the United States on... more...