CHAPTER I. THE CITY IN THE WILDERNESS. "What, are you stepping westward?" "Yea." Yet who would stop or fear to advance,Though home or shelter there was none,With such a sky to lead him on!"—WORDSWORTH. "Ah! cool night wind, tremulous stars,Ah! glimmering water,Fitful earth murmur,Dreaming woods!"—ARNOLD. In A. D. sixteen hundred and ninety-two, a few Franciscan monks... more...

STEPHEN CRANE: AN ESTIMATE It hardly profits us to conjecture what Stephen Crane might have written about the World War had he lived. Certainly, he would have been in it, in one capacity or another. No man had a greater talent for war and personal adventure, nor a finer art in describing it. Few writers of recent times could so well describe the poetry of motion as manifested in the surge and flow of... more...

CHAPTER I. EARLY LIFE.     PARACELSUS. The Boy sprang up ... and ran,Stung by the splendour of a sudden thought.— A Death in the Desert. Dass ich erkenne, was die WeltIm Innersten zusammenhält.— Faust. Judged by his cosmopolitan sympathies and his encyclopædic knowledge, by the scenery and the persons among whom his poetry habitually moves, Browning was one of the least insular of English... more...

CHAPTER I. IN THE NOTARY'S OFFICE. Brain, or heart of the land, which you will, as large cities are, Paris may claim to have nerves, muscles, and arteries centering in it, which but few capitals, by right of size, passions, horrors, loves, charms, mysteries, in a word, can reveal. To trace its emotions, impulses, secrets, wounds, cankers, joys, the following pages are devoted. We must begin by... more...

THE DUTCH SENSITIVISTS. In the intellectual history of all countries we find the same phenomenon incessantly recurring. New writers, new artists, new composers arise in revolt against what has delighted their grandfathers and satisfied their fathers. These young men, pressed together at first, by external opposition, into a serried phalanx, gradually win their way, become themselves the delight and... more...

WAYS OF NATURE I was much amused lately by a half-dozen or more letters that came to me from some Californian schoolchildren, who wrote to ask if I would please tell them whether or not birds have sense. One little girl said: "I would be pleased if you would write and tell me if birds have sense. I wanted to see if I couldn't be the first one to know." I felt obliged to reply to the... more...

CHAPTER I Death leapt upon the Rev. Charles Cardinal, Rector of St. Dreots in South Glebeshire, at the moment that he bent down towards the second long drawer of his washhand-stand; he bent down to find a clean collar. It is in its way a symbol of his whole life, that death claimed him before he could find one. At one moment his mind was intent upon his collar; at the next he was stricken with a wild... more...

I. LIFE OF SAINT MAEL Mael, a scion of a royal family of Cambria, was sent in his ninth year to the Abbey of Yvern so that he might there study both sacred and profane learning. At the age of fourteen he renounced his patrimony and took a vow to serve the Lord. His time was divided, according to the rule, between the singing of hymns, the study of grammar, and the meditation of eternal truths. A... more...

I There are certain things that I feel, as I look through this bundle of manuscript, that I must say. The first is that of course no writer ever has fulfilled his intention and no writer ever will; secondly, that there was, when I began, another intention than that of dealing with my subject adequately, namely that of keeping myself outside the whole of it; I was to be, in the most abstract and... more...

A Holy Saint. T is in the Thebaïd, on the heights of a mountain, where a platform, shaped like a crescent, is surrounded by huge stones. The Hermit's cell occupies the background. It is built of mud and reeds, flat-roofed and doorless. Inside are seen a pitcher and a loaf of black bread; in the centre, on a wooden support, a large book; on the ground, here and there, bits of rush-work, a mat or... more...