Literary Collections Books

My name is Hugh Paret. I was a corporation lawyer, but by no means a typical one, the choice of my profession being merely incidental, and due, as will be seen, to the accident of environment. The book I am about to write might aptly be called The Autobiography of a Romanticist. In that sense, if in no other, I have been a typical American, regarding my country as the happy hunting-ground of... more...

PREFATORY NOTE. T HE Pierpont Morgan Library, itself a work of art, contains masterpieces of painting and sculpture, rare books, and illuminated manuscripts. Scholars generally are perhaps not aware that it also possesses the oldest Latin manuscripts in America, including several that even the greatest European libraries would be proud to own. The collection is also admirably representative of the... more...

CHAPTER I ON THE TERRACE AT SHENSTONE Three o’clock on a dank afternoon, early in November. The wintry sunshine, in fitful gleams, pierced the greyness of the leaden sky. The great trees in Shenstone Park stood gaunt and bare, spreading wide arms over the sodden grass. All nature seemed waiting the first fall of winter’s snow, which should hide its deadness and decay under a lovely pall of... more...

A MAN OF BUSINESS The word lorette is a euphemism invented to describe the status of a personage, or a personage of a status, of which it is awkward to speak; the French Academie, in its modesty, having omitted to supply a definition out of regard for the age of its forty members. Whenever a new word comes to supply the place of an unwieldy circumlocution, its fortune is assured; the word lorette has... more...

By how much profitable thoughts are more full and solid, by so much are they also more cumbersome and heavy: vice, death, poverty, diseases, are grave and grievous subjects. A man should have his soul instructed in the means to sustain and to contend with evils, and in the rules of living and believing well: and often rouse it up, and exercise it in this noble study; but in an ordinary soul it must be... more...

Through gloomy paths unknown—   Paths which untrodden be,From rock to rock I roam   Along the dashing sea. BOWRING. * * * * * NORWICH:printed and published by jarrold and sons.1913 Contents. Preface Lines from Allan Cunningham to George Borrow The Death-raven.  From the Danish of Oehlenslæger Fridleif and Helga.  From the Danish of Oehlenslæger Sir Middel.  From the Old Danish... more...

GOING TO MAYNOOTH. Young Denis O'Shaughnessy was old Denis's son; and old Denis, like many great men before him, was the son of his father and mother in particular, and a long line of respectable ancestors in general. He was, moreover, a great historian, a perplexing controversialist, deeply read in Dr. Gallagher and Pastorini, and equally profound in the history of Harry the Eighth, and... more...

PREFACE French prose and French poetry had interested me during so many years that when Mr. Gosse invited me to write this book I knew that I was qualified in one particular—the love of my subject. Qualified in knowledge I was not, and could not be. No one can pretend to know the whole of a vast literature. He may have opened many books and turned many pages; he cannot have penetrated to the soul of... more...

When they are very little just only a baby you can never tell which one is to be a lady. There are some when they feel it inside them that it has been with them that there was once so very little of them, that they were a baby, helpless and no conscious feeling in them, that they knew nothing then when they were kissed and dandled and fixed by others who knew them when they could know nothing inside... more...

INTRODUCTION The Cattle-Raid of Cualnge [Note: Pronounce Cooley] is the chief story belonging to the heroic cycle of Ulster, which had its centre in the deeds of the Ulster king, Conchobar Mac Nessa, and his nephew and chief warrior, Cuchulainn Mac Sualtaim. Tradition places their date at the beginning of the Christian era. The events leading up to this tale, the most famous of Irish mythical stories,... more...