Literary Books

'The first poetess I can recollect is Mrs. Barbauld, with whose works I became acquainted—before those of any other author, male or female—when I was learning to spell words of one syllable in her story-books for children.' So says Hazlitt in his lectures on living poets. He goes on to call her a very pretty poetess, strewing flowers of poesy as she goes. The writer must needs, from the... more...

The River Rises DURING this big rise these small-fry craft were an intolerable nuisance. We were running chute after chute,—a new world to me,—and if there was a particularly cramped place in a chute, we would be pretty sure to meet a broad-horn there; and if he failed to be there, we would find him in a still worse locality, namely, the head of the chute, on the shoal water. And then there would... more...

CHAPTER I. It must, to admirers of Browning's writings, appear singularly appropriate that so cosmopolitan a poet was born in London. It would seem as though something of that mighty complex life, so confusedly petty to the narrow vision, so grandiose and even majestic to the larger ken, had blent with his being from the first. What fitter birthplace for the poet whom a comrade has called the... more...

INTRODUCTION Inheritance of friendships—Gracious giants—My own goodfortune—My father the central figure—What did his gift tome cost him?—A revelation in Colorado—Privileges makedifficulties—Lights and shadows of memory—An informalnarrative—Contrast between my father's life and mine. The best use we can make of good fortune is to share it with our fellows. Those to whom good... more...

BY THE RIVER. IT did not take us younger ones long to get acquainted with our new home, and to love it. To live beside a river had been to me a child's dream of romance. Rivers, as I pictured them, came down from the mountains, and were born in the clouds. They were bordered by green meadows, and graceful trees leaned over to gaze into their bright mirrors. Our shallow tidal creek was the only... more...

RECOLLECTIONS OF THE LATE WILLIAM BECKFORD. Bath, August 21, 1838. My Dear Charlotte,—I have this day seen such an astonishing assemblage of works of art, so numerous and of so surprisingly rare a description that I am literally what Lord Byron calls “Dazzled and drunk with beauty.”  I feel so bewildered from beholding the rapid succession of some of the very finest productions of the great... more...

At the end of the eighties my father and mother, my brother and sisters and myself, all newly arrived from Dublin, were settled in Bedford Park in a red-brick house with several wood mantlepieces copied from marble mantlepieces by the brothers Adam, a balcony, and a little garden shadowed by a great horse-chestnut tree. Years before we had lived there, when the crooked, ostentatiously picturesque... more...

CHAPTER 1. CHAUCER'S TIMES. The biography of Geoffrey Chaucer is no longer a mixture of unsifted facts, and of more or less hazardous conjectures. Many and wide as are the gaps in our knowledge concerning the course of his outer life, and doubtful as many important passages of it remain—in vexatious contrast with the certainty of other relatively insignificant data—we have at least become... more...

PREFACE Books about Balzac would fill a fair-sized library. Criticisms on his novels abound, and his contemporaries have provided us with several amusing volumes dealing in a humorous spirit with his eccentricities, and conveying the impression that the author of "La Cousine Bette" and "Le Pere Goriot" was nothing more than an amiable buffoon. Nevertheless, by some strange anomaly,... more...

CHAPTER I THE WESTMINSTER ASSEMBLY IN SESSION—THE SOLEMN LEAGUE AND COVENANT: SCOTTISH COMMISSIONERS IN THE ASSEMBLY—DEBATES ON CHURCH-GOVERNMENT: APOLOGETICAL NARRATION OF THE INDEPENDENTS—PARLIAMENTARY PROCEEDINGS—SCOTTISH AUXILIARY ARMY IN ENGLAND. The Westminster Assembly held its first formal meeting in Henry the Seventh's Chapel on Saturday, July 1, 1643, after the impressive opening... more...