The beginnings of Literature in England. Two poets of the best period of our old poetry, Caedmon and Cynewulf. The language they wrote in. The monastery at Whitby. The story of Caedmon's gift of song.How many of us I wonder, realise in anything like its full extent the beauty and the glory of our Catholic heritage. Do we think how the Great Mother, the keeper of truth, the guardian of beauty, the... more...

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.From diary: Mr. G. called. I had not seen him since Nauheim, Germany--several years ago; the time that the cholera broke out at Hamburg. We talked of the people we had... more...

CHAPTER I It must be admitted that the civilizing processes of Rough and Ready were not marked by any of the ameliorating conditions of other improved camps. After the discovery of the famous "Eureka" lead, there was the usual influx of gamblers and saloon-keepers; but that was accepted as a matter of course. But it was thought hard that, after a church was built and a new school erected, it... more...

The following performance, as the title imports, was originally composed in the Welch language. Its style is elegant and pure. And if the translator has not, as many of his brethren have done, suffered the spirit of the original totally to evaporate, he apprehends it will be found to contain much novelty of conception, much classical taste, and great spirit and beauty in the execution. It appears under... more...

How He Came to KnowWhat the Birds Said   There is one thing that all the Birds are afraid of, and that is the thing that will happen when the Bird That Follows the Cuckoo flies into the Cuckoo's mouth. And what will happen then, asks my kind foster-child. When the Bird that Follows the Cuckoo flies into the Cuckoo's mouth the World will come to an end. All the Birds know that, but not all... more...

THE TRAGEDY OF THE LEUTENBERGS You will recollect our first meeting on that sunny afternoon when, in the stuffy, nauseating atmosphere of perspiration and a hundred Parisian perfumes, we sat next each other at the first roulette table on the right as you enter the rooms at Monte Carlo? Ah! how vivid it is still before my eyes, the jingle of gold and the monotonous cries of the croupiers. Ah! my dear... more...

INTRODUCTION. There is hardly a person who, as a school-boy, had not received the fire of imagination and the stimulus for adventure and a roaming life through the stirring narratives concerning Captain Kidd and other well-known sea rovers. A certain ineffable glamor metamorphosed these robbers into heroes, and lent an inalienable license to their “calling,” so that the songster and romancist found... more...

A WHIFF OF THE BRINY. As I entered the D.E.F. Company's depôt, Melancholy marked me for her own. Business reasons—not my own but the more cogent business reasons of an upperling—had just postponed my summer holiday; postponed it with a lofty vagueness to "possibly November. We might be able to let you go by then, my boy." November! What would Shrimpton-on-Sea be like even at the... more...

CHAPTER I. It was a sultry summer night of the year five hundred and twenty-six, A.D. Thick clouds lay low over the dark surface of the Adrea, whose shores and waters were melted together in undistinguishable gloom; only now and then a flash of distant lightning lit up the silent city of Ravenna. At unequal intervals the wind swept through the ilexes and pines on the range of hills which rise at some... more...

CHAPTER I. Secrecy; its Uses and Abuses.—Mystery; its Definition.—Mysticism, and its Definition. It is not true, as has been sometimes said, that wherever there is secrecy there is error. Secrecy, like most all else, hath its uses and abuses: its uses, as developed in modesty and domestic virtue, in religious meditation, self-examination, and prayer, and in prudence in the affairs of life: its... more...