Literary Books

Evolution of Expression, Volume 2

Charles Wesley Emerson

The power to detach, and to magnify by detaching, is the essence of rhetoric in the hands of the orator and the poet. This rhetoric, or power to fix the momentary eminence of an object, so remarkable ..

Le Blanc et le Noir

Voltaire

Tout le monde dans la province de Candahar connaît l'aventure du jeune Rustan. Il était fils unique d'un mirza du pays; c'est comme qui dirait marquis parmi nous, ou baron chez les Allemands. Le mirza..

Escape, and Other Essays

Arthur Christopher Benson

Arthur Christopher Benson, FRSL was an English essayist, poet, author and academic and the 28th Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. He is noted for having written the words of the song "Land of Ho..

Björnstjerne Björnson, 1832-1910

William Morton Payne

When the date of Björnson's seventieth birthday drew near at the close of 1902, the present writer, who had been from boyhood a devoted admirer of the great Norwegian, wished to make an American contr..

Barry Lyndon

William Makepeace Thackeray

Barry Lyndon—far from the best known, but by some critics acclaimed as the finest, of Thackeray’s works—appeared originally as a serial a few years before VANITY FAIR was written; yet it was not publi..

Studies from Court and Cloister

J.M. Stone

These studies on various crucial points connected with the history of religion in Europe at the close of the Middle Ages, its decline, revival, and the causes which led to both, have already appeared ..

Frontier Humor in Verse, Prose and Picture

Palmer Cox

I have been sitting by my window most of the day, watching gentlemen—who were not so fortunate as myself. And I notice with considerable pain—for as reader and writer cannot understand each other too ..

The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 05

William Hazlitt

Poetry then is an imitation of nature, but the imagination and the passions are a part of man’s nature. We shape things according to our wishes and fancies, without poetry; but poetry is the most emph..