Classics Books

THE EARLY CHRISTIAN CHANTS The first Christians sang hymns. The Saviour went to His passion with a song on His lips. Matthew and Mark agree that the last act of worship in the Upper Room was the singing of a hymn. “And when they had sung a hymn, they went out unto the Mount of Olives.” How we wish that the words of that hymn might have been preserved! Perhaps they have. Many Biblical scholars... more...

CHAPTER I EARLY LIFE, AND FIRST WRITINGS It will soon be a hundred and twenty years since Burke first took his seat, in the House of Commons, and it is eighty-five years since his voice ceased to be heard there. Since his death, as during his life, opinion as to the place to which he is entitled among the eminent men of his country has touched every extreme. Tories have extolled him as the saviour of... more...

LAFE JOHNSON ARRIVES AT THE LAZY L RANCH It may come as a shock to many to learn that we have in cowland a considerable number of full-blooded men who have never made it a practice to step outside the door of a morning and shoot a fellow-citizen before breakfast. This is true; vital statistics and fiction to the contrary, notwithstanding. They are well-grown, two-fisted men, also, and work very hard... more...

INTRODUCTION. POETIC JUSTICE OF THE EXPOSURE. That the inventors of an infamous fraud should deal to it its death-blow, is the poetic justice of fate. Over the creature, the creator has power of life and death. The creators of Spiritualism abjure its infamy. They decree its death. They condemn it to final destruction. They fasten upon those who continue to practice it the obloquy of history, and the... more...

1. A Horror from the Past   drab gray sheet of cloud slipped stealthily from the moon's round face, like a shroud slipping from the face of one long dead, a coldly phosphorescent face from which the eyes had been plucked. Yellow radiance fell toward a calm, oily sea, seeking a narrow bank of fog lying low on the water, penetrating its somber mass like frozen yellow fingers. Vilma Bradley... more...

CHAPTER I. HOW I TUMBLED DOWNHILL. It is not easy for one to believe that he ever was a cub. Of course, I know that I was, and as it was only nine years ago I ought to remember it fairly clearly. It is not so much a mere matter of size, although it is doubtful if any young bear realizes how small he is. My father and mother seemed enormous to me, but, on the other hand, my sister was smaller than I,... more...

"Him?" the local postmaster of Calivada would say, in reply to your question about the quaint little old man who had just ambled away from the desk with a bundle of letters stuffed in his pocket. "Why, that's Lightnin' Bill Jones! We call him Lightnin' because he ain't. Nature didn't give no speed to Bill. No, sir, far as I know, Lightnin' 'ain't... more...

I.   The Beautiful is one of the immortal themes. It cannot die; it grows not old. On the same day with the sun was beauty born, and its life runs parallel with the path of that great beautifier. As a subject for exposition, it is at once easy and difficult: easy, from the affluence of its resources; difficult, from the exactions which its own spirit makes in the use of them. Beauty—what is it? To... more...

In the decade from 1870 to 1880 a new spirit was stirring in the intellectual and literary world of Denmark. George Brandes was delivering his lectures on the Main Currents of Nineteenth Century Literature; from Norway came the deeply probing questionings of the granitic Ibsen; from across the North Sea from England echoes of the evolutionary theory and Darwinism. It was a time of controversy and... more...

CHAPTER I Beyond the Second Portage "Oh dear, how I should love to go out!" Katherine Radford stretched her arms wearily above her head as she spoke. There had been five days of persistent snowfall; but this morning the clouds had broken, showing strips and patches of blue sky, and there was bright sunshine flooding the world again, with hard and sparkling frost. "Why don't you... more...