Classics Books

A word of introduction is needed to place the reader at the best view point from which to consider what is said in the following pages regarding the agricultural practices and customs of China, Korea and Japan. It should be borne in mind that the great factors which today characterize, dominate and determine the agricultural and other industrial operations of western nations were physical... more...

CHAPTER I THE OLD COLONIE In May, 1624, the Dutch packet New Netherlands sailed up the Hudson River to the head of navigation, bringing a company of eighteen families under the leadership of Adrian Joris. The immigrants landed at a little trading post called Beaverwick kept by one Tice Oesterhout, a pioneer hunter, married to a Mohawk Squaw. In a few days a party of Indians, probably Mohawks, waited on... more...

After an interval of more than fifty years, I propose taking a second look at some parts of Europe. It is a Rip Van Winkle experiment which I am promising myself. The changes wrought by half a century in the countries I visited amount almost to a transformation. I left the England of William the Fourth, of the Duke of Wellington, of Sir Robert Peel; the France of Louis Philippe, of Marshal Soult, of... more...

CHAPTER I THE FIRST ROUND OF THE LADDER NEW YORK, February 23, 1866. "Master Walter E. Stowe: "If you have not yet procured a situation, please call at my office, 45 Duane Street, and oblige. "Yours truly, "JNO. DERHAM,"Per T. E. D." This letter came to me in response to my application for a situation as an office-boy. I had replied to the advertisement in the Herald, without... more...

Under the title of Revolution of America, are comprised eight years of M. de Lafayette's life, from the commencement of 1771 until the end of 1784. His three voyages to the United States divide those eight years into three periods: 1777, 1778; 1779-1781; and 1782-1784.~[1] 1st. Circumstantial Memoirs, written for his friends after the peace of Versailles, and which were to have extended to 1780,... more...

PREFACE. The more frequently we read and contemplate the lives of those eminent men so beautifully traced by the amiable Izaak Walton, the more we are impressed with the sweetness and simplicity of the work. Walton was a man of genius—of simple calling and more simple habits, though best known perhaps by his book on Angling; yet in the scarcely less attractive pages of his biographies, like the... more...

INTRODUCTION EDGAR ALLAN POE: HIS LIFE, CHARACTER, AND ART Edgar Allan Poe is in many respects the most fascinating figure in American literature. His life, touched by the extremes of fortune, was on the whole more unhappy than that of any other of our prominent men of letters. His character was strangely complex, and was the subject of misunderstanding during his life and of heated dispute after his... more...

CHAPTER I. “I can hear the sullen, savage roar of the breakers, if I do not see them, and my pretty painted bark—expectation—is bearing down helplessly upon them. Perhaps the unwelcome will not come to-day. What then? I presume I should not care; and yet, I am curious to see him,—anxious to know what sort of person will henceforth rule the house, and go in and out here as master. Of course the... more...

Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians 1:1 Paul, called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ through the will of God, and our brother Sosthenes, 1:2 to the assembly of God which is at Corinth; those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, with all who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ in every place, both theirs and ours: 1:3 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the... more...

This question has often been asked but seldom answered satisfactorily. Newspaper editors and correspondents have frequently attempted a practical elucidation of the mystery, by quoting from their own brains the rarest piece of absurdity which they could imagine, and entitling it ‘Transcendentalism.’ One good hit of this kind may be well enough, by way of satire upon the fogginess of certain writers... more...