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The Greek language is being ousted from education, here, in France, and in America.  The speech of the earliest democracies is not democratic enough for modern anarchy.  There is nothing to be gained, it is said, by a knowledge of Greek.  We have not to fight the battle of life with Hellenic waiters; and, even […]

Two things are necessary in any neighbourhood where we propose to spend a life: a desert and some living water.There are many parts of the earth’s face which offer the necessary combination of a certain wildness with a kindly variety.  A great prospect is desirable, but the want may be otherwise supplied; even greatness can […]

 I understand the idea, the BAZAR invites several of us to write upon the above text. It means the change in my life’s course which introduced what must be regarded by me as the most IMPORTANT condition of my career. But it also implies—without intention, perhaps—that that turning-point ITSELF was the creator of the new […]

1. Great men are more distinguished by range and extent, than by originality. If we require the originality which consists in weaving, like a spider, their web from their own bowels; in finding clay, and making bricks, and building the house; no great men are original. Nor does valuable originality consist in unlikeness to other […]

(One Poe’s Birthday!) One does not feel, by any means, that the last word has been uttered upon this great artist. Has attention been called, for instance, to the sardonic cynicism which underlies his most thrilling effects? Poe’s cynicism is itself a very fascinating pathological subject. It is an elaborate thing, compounded of many strange […]

In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, […]

Rudyard Kipling, “prophet of blood and vulgarity, prince of ephemerals and idol of the unelect”—as a Chicago critic chortles—is dead.  It is true.  He is dead, dead and buried.  And a fluttering, chirping host of men, little men and unseeing men, have heaped him over with the uncut leaves of Kim, wrapped him in Stalky […]

As one enters Rome from the Via Ostiensis by the Porta San Paolo, the first object that meets the eye is a marble pyramid which stands close at hand on the left. There are many Egyptian obelisks in Rome—tall, snakelike spires of red sandstone, mottled with strange writings, which remind us of the pillars of […]