Biography & Autobiography Books

INTRODUCTORY These laid the world away; poured out the redSweet wine of youth; gave up the years to beOf work and joy ...And those who would have been,Their sons, they gave, their immortality. Rupert Brooke. In deciding to publish some of the letters written by the late Lieutenant H. P. M. Jones during his twenty-seven months' service with the British Army, accompanying them with a memoir, I was... more...

I. PRELIMINARY. It is over twenty years since the death of Washington Irving removed that personal presence which is always a powerful, and sometimes the sole, stimulus to the sale of an author's books, and which strongly affects the contemporary judgment of their merits. It is nearly a century since his birth, which was almost coeval with that of the Republic, for it took place the year the... more...

EARLY YEARS AND SURROUNDINGS Irving's name stands as the first landmark in American letters. No other American writer has won the same sort of recognition abroad or esteem at home as became his early in life. And he has lost very little ground, so far as we can judge by the appeal to figures. The copyright on his works ran out long since, and a great many editions of Irving, cheap and costly,... more...

I A BIOGRAPHICAL OUTLINE In July of 1904 the eighty-seven mortal years of George Frederick Watts came to an end. He had outlived all the contemporaries and acquaintances of his youth; few, even among the now living, knew him in his middle age; while to those of the present generation, who knew little of the man though much of his work, he appeared as members of the Ionides family, thus inaugurating the... more...

THE DUKE OF ARGYLL. For its size and population Scotland has been remarkably prolific in the rearing of eminent statesmen, soldiers, and litterateurs. Viewed with respect to its relative importance as an item in the map of Europe, it has likewise a most chequered and eventful history—a history to which, in various essentials, no counterpart can be found elsewhere. Chiefly, however, has "the land... more...

Farewell to Papeite beach; at sea in the Morning Star; Darwin's theory of the continent that sank beneath the waters of the South Seas. By the white coral wall of Papeite beach the schooner Fetia Taiao (Morning Star) lay ready to put to sea. Beneath the skyward-sweeping green heights of Tahiti the narrow shore was a mass of colored gowns, dark faces, slender waving arms. All Papeite,... more...

THESE STORIES are true. Although I have left the strict line of historical truth in many places, the animals in this book were all real characters. They lived the lives I have depicted, and showed the stamp of heroism and personality more strongly by far than it has been in the power of my pen to tell. I believe that natural history has lost much by the vague general treatment that is so common. What... more...

Colorado Snow Observer "Where are you going?" was the question asked me one snowy winter day. After hearing that I was off on a camping-trip, to be gone several days, and that the place where I intended to camp was in deep snow on the upper slopes of the Rockies, the questioners laughed heartily. Knowing me, some questioners realized that I was in earnest, and all that they could say in the... more...

The Birth of a Movement. HAD Longfellow the poet extended his studies a few years later than the time of the event which formed the subject of Evangeline, he would have come in contact with another race of men, of different breed, language and faith, than that of the Acadians, who were as brave as any of those who sailed away from the valley of the Gaspereaux. For almost coincident with the expulsion... more...

EASTWARD HO! Our Battalion of the Manchesters was typical of the old Territorial Force, whose memory has already faded in the glory of the greater Army created during the War, but whose services in the period between the retreat from Mons and the coming into action of "Kitchener's Men" claim national gratitude. Their earlier history hardly emerges from parochialism. Founded in 1859 and... more...