Literary Books

The Origin of Thought and Speech

M. Moncalm

Everything around us tends to keep us in this penumbra, which is so favourable to inertia, ignorance, sleep. Certain groups of philosophical ideas become condensed and systematised; in some systems th..

What Is Art?

Graf Leo Tolstoy

Again, the newspapers last year printed proposals to construct a Wagner Opera House, to cost, if I recollect rightly, £100,000—about as much as a hundred labourers may earn by fifteen or twenty years’..

The Valley of Democracy

Meredith Nicholson

The first months of the present year have been so crowded with incidents affecting the whole world that we recall with difficulty the events of only a few years ago. We have met repeated crises with a..

Sir Henry Irving—A Record of Over Twenty Years at the Lyceum

Percy Fitzgerald

There is a spectacle often witnessed in the manufacturing counties, when we may be standing waiting in one of the great stations, which leaves a melancholy impression. A huge theatrical train containi..

Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare - Twelve Essays

John Weiss

When a great freshet takes possession of a country, and evicts the tenants of every hole, thicket, and burrow, there is an indiscriminate stampede of the animals for the driest and safest places: hare..

Talks with Tolstoi

Aleksandr Borisovich

My first visit to the house of Leo Nikolaevich was on January 20th, 1896. I was not then twenty-one years old. I was almost a boy. I was taken to the Tolstois’ by a well-known Moscow lady singer who u..

The Observations of Professor Maturin

Clyde Furst

In the present book, moreover, we shall be able to read the sayings of this philosopher of the cheerful mind as they have been remembered and recorded by one who, better than any one else at all, knew..

On Translating Homer

Mathew Arnold

The frame of mind in which we approach an author influences our correctness of appreciation of him; and Homer should be approached by a translator in the simplest frame of mind possible. Modern sentim..