Non-Classifiable Books

THE FOUR-LEAF CLOVER. ELLA HIGGINSON.I know a place where the sun is like gold,    And the cherry blooms burst with snow,And down underneath is the loveliest nook,    Where the four-leaf clovers grow. One leaf is for hope, and one is faith,    And one is for love, you know;And God put another one in for luck--    If you search you will find where they grow. But you must have hope and you... more...

PREFACE A small boy who wanted to make a good impression once took his little sweetheart to an ice cream parlor. After he had vainly searched the list of edibles for something within his means, he whispered to the waiter, "Say, Mister, what you got that looks tony an' tastes nice for nineteen cents?" This is precisely the predicament in which many thousand people are today. Like the boy,... more...

I OLD CUBA Christopher Columbus was a man of lively imagination. Had he been an ordinary, prosaic and plodding individual, he would have stayed at home combing wool as did his prosaic and plodding ancestors for several generations. At the age of fourteen he went to sea and soon developed an active curiosity about regions then unknown but believed to exist. There was even then some knowledge of western... more...

INTRODUCTION —This book is not a technical treatise and is designed only to point out the plain, every-day facts in the natural scheme of making and keeping soils productive. It is concerned with the crops, methods, and fertilizers that favor the soil. The viewpoint, all the time, is that of the practical man who wants cash compensation for the intelligent care he gives to his land. The farming that... more...

INTRODUCTION "WEDNESDAY 19 JANUARY [1763]. This was a day eagerly expected by Dempster, Erskine, and I, as it was fixed as the period of our gratifying a whim proposed by me: which was that on the first day of the new Tragedy called Elvira's being acted, we three should walk from the one end of London to the other, dine at Dolly's, & be in the Theatre at night; & as the Play would... more...

BYRON. It is one of the singular facts in the history of literature, that the most rootedly conservative country in Europe should have produced the poet of the Revolution. Nowhere is the antipathy to principles and ideas so profound, nor the addiction to moderate compromise so inveterate, nor the reluctance to advance away from the past so unconquerable, as in England; and nowhere in England is there... more...

CARLYLE. The new library edition of Mr. Carlyle's works may be taken for the final presentation of all that the author has to say to his contemporaries, and to possess the settled form in which he wishes his words to go to those of posterity who may prove to have ears for them. The canon is definitely made up. The golden Gospel of Silence is effectively compressed in thirty fine volumes. After all... more...

THE DEATH OF MR. MILL. (May 1873.) The tragic commonplaces of the grave sound a fuller note as we mourn for one of the greater among the servants of humanity. A strong and pure light is gone out, the radiance of a clear vision and a beneficent purpose. One of those high and most worthy spirits who arise from time to time to stir their generation with new mental impulses in the deeper things, has... more...

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born at Boston, May 25, 1803. He was of an ancient and honourable English stock, who had transplanted themselves, on one side from Cheshire and Bedfordshire, and on the other from Durham and York, a hundred and seventy years before. For seven or eight generations in a direct and unbroken line his forefathers had been preachers and divines, not without eminence in the Puritan... more...

W. R. GREG: A SKETCH. It is perhaps a little hard to undertake to write about the personality of a thinker whose ideas one does not share, and whose reading of the events and tendencies of our time was in most respects directly opposite to one's own. But literature is neutral ground. Character is more than opinion. Here we may forget the loud cries and sounding strokes, the watchwords and the... more...