Some men deliberately don a character in early youth as others don a mask before going to an opera ball. They select it not without some care, being guided in their choice by the opinion they have formed of the world's mind and manner of proceeding. In the privacy of the dressing-room, the candles being lighted and the mirror adjusted at the best angle for a view of self, they assume their... more...

A COUNCIL ON SKATES. A strong southeast wind was blowing up the cañon and driving before it the dense yellow smoke which rolled up from the great red chimneys of the smelter. To the east and west of the town, the mountains rose abruptly, their steep sides bare or covered with patches of yellow pine. At the north, the cañon closed in to form a narrow gorge between the mountains; but towards the south... more...

PREFACE In the beginning was the land. It drew human life to our rich area of Fairfax County, and sustained us for centuries before we became so self-conscious about it as to make household language of words such as ecology and bio-degradable waste. This is where we are at, however, and thus it is thoroughly appropriate that the publication of historical research reports in this format, a new program... more...

In the decade from 1870 to 1880 a new spirit was stirring in the intellectual and literary world of Denmark. George Brandes was delivering his lectures on the Main Currents of Nineteenth Century Literature; from Norway came the deeply probing questionings of the granitic Ibsen; from across the North Sea from England echoes of the evolutionary theory and Darwinism. It was a time of controversy and... more...

CHAPTER I. The principal mountain chain of Sicily skirts the North and a portion of the North-eastern coast, and would appear to be a prolongation of the Apennines. An inferior group passes through the centre of the island, diverging towards the South, as it approaches the East coast. Between the two ranges, and completely separated from them by the valleys of the Alcantara and the Simeto, stands the... more...

Malachi 1:1 An oracle: the word of Yahweh to Israel by Malachi. 1:2 "I have loved you," says Yahweh. Yet you say, "How have you loved us?" "Wasn't Esau Jacob's brother?" says Yahweh, "Yet I loved Jacob; 1:3 but Esau I hated, and made his mountains a desolation, and gave his heritage to the jackals of the wilderness." 1:4 Whereas Edom says, "We are beaten... more...

NOTES. KING ALFRED'S GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE. There is no other printed copy of the A.-S. Orosius than the very imperfect edition of Daines Barrington, which is perhaps the most striking example of incompetent editorship which could be adduced. The text was printed from a transcript of a transcript, without much pains bestowed on collation, as he tells us himself. How much it is to be lamented that... more...

PREFACE This is a Chronicle of Dreamers, who have arisen in the Ghetto from its establishment in the sixteenth century to its slow breaking-up in our own day. Some have become historic in Jewry, others have penetrated to the ken of the greater world and afforded models to illustrious artists in letters, and but for the exigencies of my theme and the faint hope of throwing some new light upon them, I... more...

Fellow-Citizens of the Senate and of the House of Representatives: The interest with which the people of the Republic anticipate the assembling of Congress and the fulfillment on that occasion of the duty imposed upon a new President is one of the best evidences of their capacity to realize the hopes of the founders of a political system at once complex and symmetrical. While the different branches of... more...

I.   The Beautiful is one of the immortal themes. It cannot die; it grows not old. On the same day with the sun was beauty born, and its life runs parallel with the path of that great beautifier. As a subject for exposition, it is at once easy and difficult: easy, from the affluence of its resources; difficult, from the exactions which its own spirit makes in the use of them. Beauty—what is it? To... more...