Excerpt Details
Excerpt: Chapter 1. Well, when I had been dead about thirty years I begun to get a little anxious. Mind you, had been whizzing through space all that time, like a comet. Like a comet! Why, Peters, I laid over the lot of them! Of course there weren?t any of them going my way, as a steady thing, you know, because they travel in a long circle like the loop of a lasso, whereas I was pointed as straight as a dart for the Hereafter; but I happened on one every now and then that was going my way for an hour or so, and then we had a bit of a brush together....

Excerpt Details
Excerpt: That homely proverb, used on so many occasions in England, viz. ?That what is bred in the bone will not go out of the flesh,? was never more verified than in the story of my Life. Any one would think that after thirty-five years? affliction, and a variety of unhappy circumstances, which few men, if any, ever went through before, and after near seven years of peace and enjoyment in the fullness of all things; grown old, and when, if ever, it might be allowed me to have had experience of every state of middle life, and to know which was most adapted to make a man completely happy; I say, after all this, any one would have thought that the native propensity to rambling which I gave an account of in my first setting out in the world to have been so predominant in my thoughts, should be worn out, and I might, at sixty one years of age, have been a little inclined to stay at home, and have done venturing life and fortune any more....

Excerpt Details
Excerpt: An Unprotected Female at the Pyramids by Anthony Trollope.

Excerpt Details
Excerpt: Why Mrs. General Talboys first made up her mind to pass the winter of 1859 at Rome I never clearly understood. To myself she explained her purposes, soon after her arrival at the Eternal City, by declaring, in her own enthusiastic manner, that she was inspired by a burning desire to drink fresh at the still living fountains of classical poetry and sentiment....

Excerpt Details
Excerpt: While the translation is fairly literal, and Malleson (a clergyman) has taken pains with the scientific portions of the work and added the chapter headings, he has made some emendations concerning Biblical references of his own, listed below?...

Excerpt Details
Excerpt: A Dispersion. ?A telegram! Make haste and open it, Jane; they always make me so nervous! I believe that is the reason Reginald always will telegraph when he is coming,? said Miss Adeline Mohun, a very pretty, well preserved, though delicate-looking lady of some age about forty, as her elder sister, brisk and lively and some years older, came into the room....

Excerpt Details
Excerpt: Modeste Mignon by Honore de Balzac, translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley.

Excerpt Details
Excerpt: Second April by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Table of Contents Details
Contents SPRING ............................................................................................................................................. 5 CITY TREES .................................................................................................................................... 6 THE BLUE-FLAG IN THE BOG .................................................................................................... 6 JOURNEY........................................................................................................................................11 EEL-GRASS.................................................................................................................................... 12 ELEGY BEFORE DEATH ............................................................................................................. 12 THE BEAN-STALK ........................................................................................................................ 13 PASSER MORTUUS EST .............................................................................................................. 14 PASTORAL................

Excerpt Details
Excerpt: The Pickwick Papers, Volume One by Charles Dickens.

Excerpt Details
Excerpt: Paz by Honore de Balzac, translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley.

Excerpt Details
Excerpt: Chapter 1. Above Buttons. Long after the hours when tradesmen are in the habit of commencing business, the shutters of a certain shop in the town of Lymport-on-the-Sea remained significantly closed, and it became known that death had taken Mr. Melchisedec Harrington, and struck one off the list of living tailors....

Excerpt Details
Excerpt: Is it not a necessity to explain to a public curious to know everything, how I came to be sufficiently learned in the law to carry on the business of my little world? And in so doing, am I not bound to put on record the memory of the amiable and intelligent man who, meeting the Scribe (another clerkamateur) at a ball, said, ?Just give the office a turn; there is work for you there, I assure you?? But do you need this public testimony to feel assured of the affection of the writer?...

Excerpt Details
Preface: As the most striking lines of poetry are the most hackneyed, because they have grown to be the common inheritance of all the world, so many of the most noble deeds that earth can show have become the best known, and enjoyed their full meed of fame. Therefore it may be feared that many of the events here detailed, or alluded to, may seem trite to those in search of novelty; but it is not for such that the collection has been made....

Excerpt Details
Excerpt: The increase of the towns of Manhattan, as, for the sake of convenience, we shall term New York and her adjuncts, in all that contributes to the importance of a great commercial mart, renders them one of the most remarkable places of the present age. Within the distinct recollections of living men, they have grown from a city of the fifth or sixth class to be near the head of all the purely trading places of the known world. That there are sufficient causes for this unparalleled prosperity, will appear in the analysis of the natural advantages of the port, in its position, security, accessories, and scale....

Excerpt Details
Excerpt: The Heir of Redclyffe by Charlotte M. Yonge.

Excerpt Details
Excerpt: The malady of the age. On a fine evening in the month of September, 1836, a man about thirty years of age was leaning on the parapet of that quay from which a spectator can look up the Seine from the Jardin des Plantes to Notre-Dame, and down, along the vast perspective of the river, to the Louvre. There is not another point of view to compare with it in the capital of ideas. We feel ourselves on the quarter-deck, as it were, of a gigantic vessel. We dream of Paris from the days of the Romans to those of the Franks, from the Normans to the Burgundians, the Middle-Ages, the Valois, Henri IV., Louis XIV., Napoleon, and Louis-Philippe. Vestiges are before us of all those sovereignties, in monuments that recall their memory....

Excerpt Details
Excerpt: The Volsunga Saga translated by William Morris and Eirikr Magnusson (1888).

Table of Contents Details
Contents INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................5 TRANSLATORS? PREFACE.......................................................................23 THE STORY OF THE VOLSUNGS AND NIBLUNGS.............................26 APPENDIX:.................................................................................................132 EXCERPTS FROM THE POETIC EDDA.............................................................................................................. 132 PART OF THE LAY OF SIGRDRIFA (1)................................................................................................................. 139 THE LAY CALLED .................................................................................................................................................. 142 THE SHORT LAY OF SIGURD.............................................................................................................................. 142 THE HELL-RIDE OF BRYNHILD ............................................................................................................................

Excerpt Details
Excerpt: The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling by Henry Fielding: Volume Two, Containing Books IX through XVIII.

Excerpt Details
Excerpt: PHILO: Nay, but this dotage of our general?s overflows the measure: those his goodly eyes, That o?er the files and musters of the war Have glow?d like plated Mars, now bend, now turn, The office and devotion of their view Upon a tawny front: his captain?s heart, Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper, And is become the bellows and the fan To cool a gipsy?s lust....

Excerpt Details
Excerpt: A chapter of which the last page only is of any importance comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing. Credulity is not wooed through the impressionable senses; nor have we recourse to the small circular glow of the watchmaker?s eye to raise in bright relief minutest grains of evidence for the routing of incredulity....