Classics Books

CHAPTER I Cherry Strickland came in the door of the Strickland house, and shut it behind her, and stood so, with her hands behind her on the knob, and her slender body leaning forward, and her breath rising and falling on deep, ecstatic breaths. It was May in California, she was just eighteen, and for twenty-one minutes she had been engaged to be married. She hardly knew why, after that last farewell... more...

THE LIFE OF BROWNING Robert Browning, the poet, was the third of that name. The first Robert Browning, a man of energy and ability, held an important post in the Bank of England. His wife, Margaret Tittle, was a Creole from the West Indies, and at the time of her marriage her property was still in the estates owned by her father near St. Kitts. When their son, the second Robert, was seven years of age,... more...

Intellectual advance occurs in two ways. At times increase of knowledge is organized about old conceptions, while these are expanded, elaborated and refined, but not seriously revised, much less abandoned. At other times, the increase of knowledge demands qualitative rather than quantitative change; alteration, not addition. Men's minds grow cold to their former intellectual concerns; ideas that... more...

The Sword of Welleran Where the great plain of Tarphet runs up, as the sea in estuaries, among the Cyresian mountains, there stood long since the city of Merimna well-nigh among the shadows of the crags. I have never seen a city in the world so beautiful as Merimna seemed to me when first I dreamed of it. It was a marvel of spires and figures of bronze, and marble fountains, and trophies of fabulous... more...

INTRODUCTORY The Myxomycetes, or slime-moulds, include certain very delicate and extremely beautiful fungus-like organisms common in all the moist and wooded regions of the earth. Deriving sustenance, as they for the most part do, in connection with the decomposition of organic matter, they are usually to be found upon or near decaying logs, sticks, leaves, and other masses of vegetable detritus,... more...

In the "foreword" to the reprint of this tract in the "Miscellanies" of 1711, Swift remarks: "I have been assured that the suspicion which the supposed author lay under for writing this letter absolutely ruined him with the late ministry." The "late ministry" was the Whig ministry of which Godolphin was the Premier. To this ministry the repeal of the Test Act was a... more...

Hard is the task of the man who at this late day attempts to say anything new about Washington. But perhaps it may be possible to unsay some of the things which have been said, and which, though they were at one time new, have never at any time been strictly true. The character of Washington, emerging splendid from the dust and tumult of those great conflicts in which he played the leading part, has... more...

A VOICE ON THE WINDShe walks with the wind on the windy heightWhen the rocks are loud and the waves are white,And all night long she calls through the night,"O, my children, come home!"Her bleak gown, torn as a tattered cloud,Tosses around her like a shroud,While over the deep her voice rings loud,—"O, my children, come home, come home!O, my children, come home!"Who is she who wanders... more...

Introduction. i. Introduction There are two great rivers of Europe which, in their course, offer a not uninstructive analogy to the Church of God. The Rhine and the Rhone both take their rise from mountain glaciers, and for the first hundred or hundred and fifty miles from their sources they run turbid as glacier streams always are, and for the most part turbulent as mountain torrents. Then they enter... more...

CHAPTER I On the borders of the Forest of Munza-mulgar lived once an old grey fruit-monkey of the name of Mutt-matutta. She had three sons, the eldest Thumma, the next Thimbulla, and the youngest, who was a Nizza-neela, Ummanodda. And they called each other for short, Thumb, Thimble, and Nod. The rickety, tumble-down old wooden hut in which they lived had been built 319 Munza years before by a... more...