A College Magazine by Robert Louis Stevenson I All through my boyhood and youth, I was known and pointed out for the pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one […]
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To a Young Journalist by Andrew Lang
Dear Smith,— You inform me that you desire to be a journalist, and you are kind enough to ask my advice. Well, be a journalist, by all means, in any honest and honourable branch of the profession. But do not be an eavesdropper and a spy. You may fly into a passion when you receive […]
Art and the Handicraftsman by Oscar Wilde
Art and the Handicraftsman by Oscar Wilde PEOPLE often talk as if there was an opposition between what is beautiful and what is useful. There is no opposition to beauty except ugliness: all things are either beautiful or ugly, and utility will be always on the side of the beautiful thing, because beautiful decoration is […]
What is ‘Popular Poetry’? by W. B. Yeats
What is ‘Popular Poetry’? by W. B. Yeats I think it was a Young Ireland Society that set my mind running on ‘popular poetry.’ We used to discuss everything that was known to us about Ireland, and especially Irish literature and Irish history. We had no Gaelic, but paid great honour to the Irish poets […]
Reading by Henry David Thoreau
Reading by Henry David Thoreau With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike. In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, […]
A New Point of View by Leo Tolstoy
A New Point of View by Leo Tolstoy Katenka was with me in the britchka; her lovely head inclined as she gazed pensively at the roadway. I looked at her in silence and wondered what had brought the unchildlike expression of sadness to her face which I now observed for the first time there. “We […]
France by Gertrude Stein
Likely and more than evenly, unevenly and not unlikely, very much that and anyway more, this is the left over method. There is nothing left because if it were left it would be left over. This does not make music. The time to state that is in reading. There is a beginning in a lesson […]
About War Poetry by George Herbert Clarke (1917)
About War Poetry by George Herbert Clarke (1917) Because man is both militant and pacific, he has expressed in literature, as indeed in the other forms of art, his pacific and militant moods. Nor are these moods, of necessity, incompatible. War may become the price of peace, and peace may so decay as inevitably to […]
The Happiest of the Poets by W. B. Yeats
I Rossetti in one of his letters numbers his favourite colours in the order of his favour, and throughout his work one feels that he loved form and colour for themselves and apart from what they represent. One feels sometimes that he desired a world of essences, of unmixed powers, of impossible purities. It is […]
Of Love by Francis Bacon
THE stage is more beholding to love, than the life of man. For as to the stage, love is ever matter of comedies, and now and then of tragedies; but in life it doth much mischief; sometimes like a siren, sometimes like a fury. You may observe, that amongst all the great and worthy persons […]
What is Genius by Joseph Addision
—Cui mens divinior, atque os Magna sonaturum des nominis hujus honorem. Hor., Sat. i. 4, 43. On him confer the poet’s sacred name, Whose lofty voice declares the heavenly flame. There is no character more frequently given to a writer than that of being a genius. I have heard many a little sonneteer called a […]
The Life Beyond 1910 by Joseph Conrad
You have no doubt noticed that certain books produce a sort of physical effect on one—mostly an audible effect. I am not alluding here to Blue books or to books of statistics. The effect of these is simply exasperating and no more. No! the books I have in mind are just the common books of […]
Of Fools by Daniel Defoe
Of all persons who are objects of our charity, none move my compassion like those whom it has pleased God to leave in a full state health and strength, but deprived of reason to act for themselves. And it is, in my opinion, one of the greatest scandals upon the understanding of others to mock […]
Mark Twain Autobiography: On Duels and Shakespeare
In those early days duelling suddenly became a fashion in the new Territory of Nevada, and by 1864 everybody was anxious to have a chance in the new sport, mainly for the reason that he was not able to thoroughly respect himself so long as he had not killed or crippled somebody in a duel […]
50 Common Mistakes in Speaking and Writing
1. “The business would suit any one who enjoys bad health.” [From an advertisement in a daily newspaper of New-York.] Few persons who have bad health can be said to enjoy it. Use some other form of expression: as, one in delicate health, or, one whose health is bad. 2. “We have no corporeal punishment […]