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 […]
Historic Articles by Authors
The Turning-Point of My Life by Mark Twain
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 […]
Shakespeare; or The Poet by Ralph Waldo Emerson
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 […]
Dante, the Divine Poet by Alice Birkhead
There were still Guelfs and Ghibellines in 1265, but the old names had partially lost their meaning in the Republic of Florence, where the citizens brawled daily, one faction against the other. The nobles had, nevertheless, a bond with the emperor, being of the same Teutonic stock, and the burghers often sought the patronage of […]
Printing and Printers by Oscar Wilde
Nothing could have been better than Mr. Emery Walker’s lecture on Letterpress Printing and Illustration, delivered last night at the Arts and Crafts. A series of most interesting specimens of old printed books and manuscripts was displayed on the screen by means of the magic-lantern, and Mr. Walker’s explanations were as clear and simple as […]
My Letter to Thomas Nast Sells! by Mark Twain
This is from this morning’s paper: Mark Twain Letter Sold. Written to Thomas Nast, it Proposed a Joint Tour. A Mark Twain autograph letter brought $43 yesterday at the auction by the Merwin-Clayton Company of the library and correspondence of the late Thomas Nast, cartoonist. The letter is nine pages note-paper, is dated Hartford, Nov. […]
Home-made Music Walt Whitman
August 8th.—To-night, as I was trying to keep cool, sitting by a wounded soldier in Armory-square, I was attracted by some pleasant singing in an adjoining ward. As my soldier was asleep, I left him, and entering the ward where the music was, I walk’d halfway down and took a seat by the cot of […]
Falling in Love by Grant Allen (1889)
An ancient and famous human institution is in pressing danger. Sir George Campbell has set his face against the time-honoured practice of Falling in Love. Parents innumerable, it is true, have set their faces against it already from immemorial antiquity; but then they only attacked the particular instance, without venturing to impugn the institution itself […]
Edgar Allan Poe by John Cowper Powys (1915)
(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 […]
Liberty Attained by Fredrick Douglass
TRANSITION FROM SLAVERY TO FREEDOM—A WANDERER IN NEW YORK—FEELINGS ON REACHING THAT CITY—AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE MET—UNFAVORABLE IMPRESSIONS—LONELINESS AND INSECURITY—APOLOGY FOR SLAVES WHO RETURN TO THEIR MASTERS—COMPELLED TO TELL MY CONDITION—SUCCORED BY A SAILOR—DAVID RUGGLES—THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD—MARRIAGE—BAGGAGE TAKEN FROM ME—KINDNESS OF NATHAN JOHNSON—MY CHANGE OF NAME—DARK NOTIONS OF NORTHERN CIVILIZATION—THE CONTRAST—COLORED PEOPLE IN NEW BEDFORD—AN INCIDENT […]
My Views on Romance by Robert Louis Stevenson
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, […]
These Bones Shall Rise Again by Jack London
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 […]
Tomb of Keats by Oscar Wilde
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 […]
The Poet as Lover by Elizabeth Atkins
Do the Phaedrus and the Symposium leave anything to be said on the relationship of love and poetry? In the last analysis, probably not. The poet, however, is not one to keep silence because of a dearth of new philosophical conceptions. As he discovers, with ever fresh wonder, the power of love as muse, each […]
American Literature in Exile by William Dean Howells
A recently lecturing Englishman is reported to have noted the unenviable primacy of the United States among countries where the struggle for material prosperity has been disastrous to the pursuit of literature. He said, or is said to have said (one cannot be too careful in attributing to a public man the thoughts that may […]