On Siegfried Sassoon by Robert Nichols Sassoon the Man: In appearance he is tall, big-boned, loosely built. He is clean-shaven, pale or with a flush; has a heavy jaw, wide mouth with the upper lip slightly protruding and the curve of it very pronounced like that of a shrivelled leaf (as I have noticed is common […]
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Difficulty of Analysis The Human Mind by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Difficulty of Analysis The Human Mind by Percy Bysshe Shelley If it were possible that a person should give a faithful history of his being, from the earliest epochs of his recollection, a picture would be presented such as the world has never contemplated before. A mirror would be held up to all men in […]
On The Physiology of Laughter by Herbert Spencer
On The Physiology of Laughter by Herbert Spencer Why do we smile when a child puts on a man’s hat? or what induces us to laugh on reading that the corpulent Gibbon was unable to rise from his knees after making a tender declaration? The usual reply to such questions is, that laughter results from […]
William Blake and the Imagination by W. B. Yeats
William Blake and the Imagination by W. B. Yeats There have been men who loved the future like a mistress, and the future mixed her breath into their breath and shook her hair about them, and hid them from the understanding of their times. William Blake was one of these men, and if he spoke […]
A College Magazine by Robert Louis Stevenson
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 […]
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 […]