Fiction Books

CHAPTER I.O that Decay were always beautiful!How soft the exit of the dying day,The dying season too, its disarrayIs gold and scarlet, hues of gay misrule,So it in festive cheer may pass away;Fading is excellent in earth or air,With it no budding April may compare,Nor fragrant June with long love-laden hours;Sweet is decadence in the quiet bowersWhere summer songs and mirth are fallen asleep,And sweet... more...

The transport swung past Centaurus on the last leg of her long journey to Sol. There was no flash, no roar as she swept across the darkness of space. As silent as a ghost, as quiet as a puff of moonlight she moved, riding the gravitational fields that spread like tangled, invisible spider webs between the stars. Within the ship there was also silence, but the air was stirred by a faint, persistent... more...

The First Book of Kings 1:1 Now king David was old and stricken in years; and they covered him with clothes, but he got no heat. 1:2 Therefore his servants said to him, Let there be sought for my lord the king a young virgin: and let her stand before the king, and cherish him; and let her lie in your bosom, that my lord the king may keep warm. 1:3 So they sought for a beautiful young lady throughout... more...

§ 1. THE TERM The names ‘rationalist’ and ‘rationalism’ have been used in so many senses within the past three hundred years that they cannot be said to stand quite definitely for any type or school of philosophic thought. For Bacon, a ‘rationalist’ or rationalis was a physician with a priori views of disease and bodily function; and the Aristotelian humanists of the Helmstadt school were... more...

THE HYLA BISTINCTA GROUP The five species comprising the Hyla bistincta group are moderate-sized hylids having rather blunt heads and robust bodies. The fingers are long and have little webbing (Fig. 1). The skin of the dorsum is thick and glandular, but not tuberculate. An anal sheath is present. The skull is rather broad, flat, and solidly roofed. The ethmoid is broad, curved downward laterally, and... more...

CHAPTER I THE STORM All day long, from an hour before the pale dawn until now after the thick dark, the storm had raged through the mountains. Before midday it had grown dark in the cañons. In the driving blast of the wind many a tall pine had snapped, broken at last after long valiant years of victorious buffeting with the seasons, while countless tossing branches had been riven away from the parent... more...

I THE SUBJECT In these days immediately following the Great War it is well upon beginning anything--even a modest biographical sketch--to consider a few elementals and distinguish them from the changing unessentials, to keep a sound basis of sense and not be led into hysteria, to look carefully again at the beams of our house and not be deceived into thinking that the plaster and the wall paper are the... more...

HUMORESQUE On either side of the Bowery, which cuts through like a drain to catch its sewage, Every Man's Land, a reeking march of humanity and humidity, steams with the excrement of seventeen languages, flung in patois from tenement windows, fire escapes, curbs, stoops, and cellars whose walls are terrible and spongy with fungi. By that impregnable chemistry of race whereby the red blood of the... more...

In tragic life, God wot,No villain need be! Passions spin the plot:We are betray'd by what is false within.—GEORGE MEREDITH."I can't get out," said Sterne's starling, looking through the bars of his cage. "I will get out," said Hugh Scarlett to himself, seeing no bars, but half conscious of a cage. "I will get out," he repeated, as his hansom took him swiftly... more...

I - EXPERIMENTS There are two separate processes going on among the civilized nations at the present time. One is an assault by socialism against the individualism which underlies the social system of western civilization. The other is an assault against existing institutions upon the ground that they do not adequately protect and develop the existing social order. It is of this latter process in our... more...