Classics Books

Chapter I. Christmas Eve. It was the afternoon of Christmas Eve, sinking towards the night. All day long the wintry light had been diluted with fog, and now the vanguard of the darkness coming to aid the mist, the dying day was well nigh smothered between them. When I looked through the window, it was into a vague and dim solidification of space, a mysterious region in which awful things might be going... more...

I am B-12, a metal person. If you read and the other progressive journals you will know that in some quarters of the galaxy there is considerable prejudice directed against us. It is ever so with minority races, and I do not complain. I merely make this statement so that you will understand about the alarm clock. An alarm clock is a simple mechanism used by the Builders to shock themselves into... more...

PREFACE. APPEARING before the Public as a translator of the Oracles of God, it would ill become me to deprecate the severity of criticism, when I most cordially desire the intelligent and learned of my brethren to point out my mistakes for correction, and, in love and in the spirit of meekness, to smite me friendly. Should, however, the shafts of malignity, and the weapons not of our warfare, be... more...

I. ON LANDSEER'S CHARACTER AS AN ARTIST. If the popularity of a painter were the measure of his artistic greatness, Sir Edwin Landseer's would be among the foremost of the world's great names. At the height of his career probably no other living painter was so familiar and so well beloved throughout the English-speaking world. There were many homes in England and America where his... more...

Chapter One Nothing could have been more painful to my sensitiveness than to occupy myself, confused with blushes, at the center of the whole world as a living advertisement of the least amusing ballet in Paris. To be the day's sensation of the boulevards one must possess an eccentricity of appearance conceived by nothing short of genius; and my misfortunes had reduced me to present such to all... more...

CHAPTER I At seven o'clock on a fine evening in April the gas had just been lighted in a room on the first floor of a house in York Road, Lambeth. A man, recently washed and brushed, stood on the hearthrug before a pier glass, arranging a white necktie, part of his evening dress. He was about thirty, well grown, and fully developed muscularly. There was no cloud of vice or trouble upon him: he was... more...

The Roman Roads in Picardy If a man were asked where he would find upon the map the sharpest impress of Rome and of the memories of Rome, and where he would most easily discover in a few days on foot the foundations upon which our civilization still rests, he might, in proportion to his knowledge of history and of Europe, be puzzled to reply. He might say that a week along the wall from Tyne to Solway... more...

CHAPTER I For the purposes of the average Russian, and still more for the purposes of the foreigner, Russian literature begins with the nineteenth century, that is to say with the reign of Alexander I. It was then that the literary fruits on which Russia has since fed were born. The seeds were sown, of course, centuries earlier; but the history of Russian literature up to the nineteenth century is not... more...

A WANDERER. "There's no such word."—BULWER. A wind was blowing through the city. Not a gentle and balmy zephyr, stirring the locks on gentle ladies' foreheads and rustling the curtains in elegant boudoirs, but a chill and bitter gale that rushed with a swoop through narrow alleys and forsaken courtyards, biting the cheeks of the few solitary wanderers that still lingered abroad in... more...

THE LOVE-LIGHT. Long ago, in the days when our caged blackbirds never saw a king’s soldier without whistling impudently, “Come ower the water to Charlie,” a minister of Thrums was to be married, but something happened, and he remained a bachelor. Then, when he was old, he passed in our square the lady who was to have been his wife, and her hair was white, but she, too, was still unmarried. The... more...