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Excerpt: How at the vigil of the Feast of Pentecost entered into the hall before King Arthur a damosel, and desired Sir Launcelot for to come and dub a knight, and how he went with her. At the vigil of Pentecost, when all the fellowship of the Round Table were come unto Camelot and there heard their service, and the tables were set ready to the meat, right so entered into the hall a full fair gentlewoman on horseback, that had ridden full fast, for her horse was all besweated....

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Preface: When the venture has been made of dealing with historical events and characters, it always seems fair towards the reader to avow what liberties have been taken, and how much of the sketch is founded on history. In the present case, it is scarcely necessary to do more than refer to the almost unique relations that subsisted between Henry V. and his prisoner, James I. of Scotland; who lived with him throughout his reign on the terms of friend rather than of captive, and was absolutely sheltered by this imprisonment throughout his nonage and early youth from the frightful violence and presumption of the nobles of his kingdom....

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. How Beaumains came to King Arthur?s Court and demanded three petitions of King Arthur. When Arthur held his Round Table most plenour, it fortuned that he commanded that the high feast of Pentecost should be holden at a city and a castle, the which in those days was called Kynke Kenadonne, upon the sands that marched nigh Wales. So ever the king had a custom that at the feast of Pentecost in especial, afore other feasts in the year, he would not go that day to meat until he had heard or seen of a great marvel....

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Excerpt: CHAPTER 1. Fellow Travelers. In the autumn of the year, Darkness and Night were creeping up to the highest ridges of the Alps. It was vintage time in the valleys on the Swiss side of the Pass of the Great Saint Bernard, and along the banks of the Lake of Geneva....

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CONTENTS BOOK THE SECOND: RICHES 1. Fellow Travellers 2. Mrs General 3. On the Road 4. A Letter from Little Dorrit 5. Something Wrong Somewhere 6. Something Right Somewhere 7. Mostly, Prunes and Prism 8. The Dowager Mrs Gowan is reminded that ?It Never Does? 9. Appearance and Disappearance 10. The Dreams of Mrs Flintwinch thicken 11. A Letter from Little Dorrit 12. In which a Great Patriotic Conference is holden 13. The Progress of an Epidemic 14. Taking Advice 15. No just Cause or Impediment why these Two Persons should not be joined together 16. Getting on 17. Missing 18. A Castle in the Air 19. The Storming of the Castle in the Air 20. Introduces the next 21. The History of a Self-Tormentor 22. Who Passes by this Road so late? 23. Mistress Affery makes a Conditional Promise, respecting her Dreams 24. The Evening of a Long Day 25. The Chief Butler Resigns the Seals of Office 26. Reaping the Whirlwind 27. The Pupil of the Marshalsea 28. An Appearance in the Marshalsea 29. A Plea in the Marshalsea 30. Closing in...

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. Part The First. Once upon a time, it matters little when, and in stalwart England, it matters little where, a fierce battle was fought. It was fought upon a long summer day when the waving grass was green. Many a wild flower formed by the Almighty Hand to be a perfumed goblet for the dew, felt its enameled cup filled high with blood that day, and shrinking dropped. Many an insect deriving its delicate color from harmless leaves and herbs, was stained anew that day by dying men, and marked its frightened way with an unnatural track. The painted butterfly took blood into the air upon the edges of its wings. The stream ran red....

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Introduction: A certain degree of success, real or supposed, in the delineation of Queen Mary, naturally induced the author to attempt something similar respecting ?her sister and her foe,? the celebrated Elizabeth. He will not, however, pretend to have approached the task with the same feelings; for the candid Robertson himself confesses having felt the prejudices with which a Scottishman is tempted to regard the subject; and what so liberal a historian avows, a poor romance-writer dares not disown. But he hopes the influence of a prejudice, almost as natural to him as his native air, will not be found to have greatly affected the sketch he has attempted of England?s Elizabeth....

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham -- 2. Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob; and Jacob begat Judas and his brethren -- 3. And Judas begat Phares and Zara of Thamar; and Phares begat Esrom; and Esrom begat Aram; 4 And Aram begat Aminadab; and Aminadab begat Naasson; and Naasson begat Salmon -- 5. And Salmon begat Booz of Rachab; and Booz begat Obed of Ruth; and Obed begat Jesse -- 6. And Jesse begat David the king; and David the king begat Solomon of her that had been the wife of Urias -- 7. And Solomon begat Roboam; and Roboam begat Abia; and Abia begat Asa; 8 And Asa begat Josaphat; and Josaphat begat Joram; and Joram begat Ozias....

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. The word of the LORD that came to Micah the Morasthite in the days of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, which he saw concerning Samaria and Jerusalem -- 2. Hear, all ye people; hearken, O earth, and all that therein is: and let the Lord GOD be witness against you, the LORD from his holy temple -- 3. For, behold, the LORD cometh forth out of his place, and will come down, and tread upon the high places of the earth....

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Excerpt: The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells.

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Excerpt: The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane.

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Excerpt: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur?s Court by Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens).

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Excerpt: What Is Coming? A Forecast of Things after the War by H. G. Wells.

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Excerpt: LO I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske, As time her taught, in lowly Shepheards weeds, Am now enforst a far vnfitter taske, For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds, And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds; Whose prayses hauing slept in silence long, Me, all too meane, the sacred Muse areeds To blazon broad emongst her learned throng: Fierce warres and faithfull loues shall moralize my song....

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Excerpt: These papers I am anxious to put into the hands of your house, and, so far as regards the U.S., of your house exclusively; not with any view to further emolument, but as an acknowledgment of the services which you have already rendered me; namely, first, in having brought together so widely scattered a collection--a difficulty which in my own hands by too painful an experience I had found from nervous depression to be absolutely insurmountable; secondly, in having made me a participator in the pecuniary profits of the American edition, without solicitation or the shadow of any expectation on my part, without any legal claim that I could plead, or equitable warrant in established usage, solely and merely upon your own spontaneous motion. Some of these new papers, I hope, will not be without their value in the eyes of those who have taken an interest in the original series. But at all events, good or bad, they are now tendered to the appropriation of your individual house, the Messrs. Ticknor & Fields, according to the amplest extent of any power to make such a transfer that I may be found to possess by law or custom in Ameri...

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Contents MEMORIALS, AND OTHER PAPERS, VOL. I. ....................................................................................................... 4 FROM THE AUTHOR, TO THE AMERICAN EDITOR OF HIS WORKS. .......................................................... 4 EXPLANATORY NOTICES....................................................................................................................................... 5 THE ORPHAN HEIRESS......................................................................................................................................... 18 OXFORD .................................................................................................................................................................... 96 THE PAGAN ORACLES ........................................................................................................................................ 160 THE REVOLUTION OF GREECE. ....................................................................................................................... 194 MEMORIALS, AND OTHER PAPERS, VOL. II. ................................................

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Excerpt: The writer of a book which copies the manners and language of Queen Anne?s time, must not omit the Dedication to the Patron; and I ask leave to inscribe this volume to your Lordship, for the sake of the great kindness and friendship which I owe to you and yours. My volume will reach you when the Author is on his voyage to a country where your name is as well known as here. Wherever I am, I shall gratefully regard you; and shall not be the less welcomed in America because I am....

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Excerpt: GEORGIC I What makes the cornfield smile; beneath what star Maecenas, it is meet to turn the sod Or marry elm with vine; how tend the steer; What pains for cattle-keeping, or what proof Of patient trial serves for thrifty bees;-- Such are my themes....

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Contents THE GEORGICS............................................................................3 GEORGIC I.....................................................................................3 GEORGIC II...............................................................................18 GEORGIC III.............................................................................35 GEORGIC IV...............................................................................51 THE ECLOGUES................................................................................68 ECLOGUE I..................................................................................68 ECLOGUE II................................................................................72 ECLOGUE III...............................................................................75 ECLOGUE IV...............................................................................82 ECLOGUE V.................................................................................84 ECLOGUE VI...............................................................................88 ECLOGUE VII....................

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Excerpt: Preface to Fanny?s First Play. Fanny?s First Play, being but a potboiler, needs no preface. But its lesson is not, I am sorry to say, unneeded. Mere morality, or the substitution of custom for conscience was once accounted a shameful and cynical thing: people talked of right and wrong, of honor and dishonor, of sin and grace, of salvation and damnation, not of morality and immorality. The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car. Nowadays we do not seem to know that there is any other test of conduct except morality; and the result is that the young had better have their souls awakened by disgrace, capture by the police, and a month?s hard labor, than drift along from their cradles to their graves doing what other people do for no other reason than that other people do it, and knowing nothing of good and evil, of courage and cowardice, or indeed anything but how to keep hunger and concupiscence and fashionable dressing within the bounds of good taste except when their excesses can be concealed....

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. The Levins had been three months in Moscow. The date had long passed on which, according to the most trustworthy calculations of people learned in such matters, Kitty should have been confined. But she was still about, and there was nothing to show that her time was any nearer than two months ago. The doctor, the monthly nurse, and Dolly and her mother, and most of all Levin, who could not think of the approaching event without terror, began to be impatient and uneasy. Kitty was the only person who felt perfectly calm and happy....

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Excerpt: The Book of Nehemiah, the Sixteenth Book of the King James Version of the Bible.

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Excerpt: The Divine Comedy, Volume Two, Purgatory [Purgatorio] by Dante Aligheri, trans Charles Eliot Norton.

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Contents PURGATORY................................................................... 6 CANTO I. Invocation to the Muses.?Dawn of Easter on the shore of Purgatory.?The Four Stars.?Cato.?The cleansing of Dante from the stains of Hell. ............................................................................................................ 6 CANTO II. Sunrise.?The Poets on the shore.?Coming of a boat, guided by an angel, bearing souls to Purgatory.? Their landing.?Casella and his song.?Cato hurries the souls to the mountain. ................................. 10 CANTO III. Ante-Purgatory.?Souls of those who have died in contumacy of the Church.? Manfred. ............. 13 CANTO IV. Ante-Purgatory.?Ascent to a shelf of the mountain.?The negligent, who postponed repentance to the last hour.?Belacqua. ..................................................................................................................................... 16 CANTO V. Ante-Purgatory.?Spirits who had delayed repentance, and met with death by violence, but died repentant.?Jacopo del Cassero.?Buonconte da Montefeltro?Via de? Tolomei. ................................

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Introduction: ?For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost; and is found.? He was lost by the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps. He was officially dead as a result of official misinformation....

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Introduction: 1. The Occasion of the Work. -- Luther did not impose himself as reformer upon the Church. In the course of a conscientious performance of the duties of his office, to which he had been regularly and divinely called, and without any urging on his part, he attained to this position by inward necessity. In 1515 he received his appointment as the standing substitute for the sickly city pastor, Simon Heinse, from the city council of Wittenberg. Before this time he was obliged to preach only occasionally in the convent, apart from his activity as teacher in the University and convent. Through this appointment he was in duty bound, by divine and human right, to lead and direct the congregation at Wittenberg on the true way to life, and it would have been a denial of the knowledge of salvation which God had led him to acquire, by way of ardent inner struggles, if he had led the congregation on any other way than the one God had revealed to him in His Word. He could not deny before the congregation which had been intrusted to his care, what up to this time he had taught with ever increasing clearness in his lectures at the Uni...

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Excerpt: Salammbo by Gustave Flaubert.

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Introduction: Queen Elizabeth herself, and London as it was in her time, with sketches of Elizabethan England, and of its great men in the way of social dignity, are here brought home to us by Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton....

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. The Karenins, husband and wife, continued living in the same house, met every day, but were complete strangers to one another. Alexey Alexandrovitch made it a rule to see his wife every day, so that the servants might have no grounds for suppositions, but avoided dining at home. Vronsky was never at Alexey Alexandrovitch?s house, but Anna saw him away from home, and her husband was aware of it....

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Preface: Thirteen men were banded together in Paris under the Empire, all imbued with one and the same sentiment, all gifted with sufficient energy to be faithful to the same thought, with sufficient honor among themselves never to betray one another even if their interests clashed; and sufficiently wily and politic to conceal the sacred ties that united them, sufficiently strong to maintain themselves above the law, bold enough to undertake all things, and fortunate enough to succeed, nearly always, in their undertakings; having run the greatest dangers, but keeping silence if defeated; inaccessible to fear; trembling neither before princes, nor executioners, not even before innocence; accepting each other for such as they were, without social prejudices,--criminals, no doubt, but certainly remarkable through certain of the qualities that make great men, and recruiting their number only among men of mark....

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Excerpt: Taras Bulba and Other Tales by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol.

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Contents INTRODUCTION ............................................................ 4 TARAS BULBA.............................................................. 13 ST. JOHN?S EVE ......................................................... 130 THE CLOAK ................................................................ 146 HOW THE TWO IVANS QUARRELLED .................. 176 THE MYSTERIOUS PORTRAIT ................................ 223 THE CALASH .............................................................. 270...

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Excerpt: Wilhelm Tell by Johann Christoph Freidrich von Schiller, translated by Theodore Martin.

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THE SIXTY-SECOND BOOK OF THE HOLY BIBLE CONTAINING THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS TRANSLATED OUT OF THE ORIGINAL TONGUES AND WITH THE FORMER TRANSLATIONS DILIGENTLY COMPARED & REVISED SET FORTH IN 1611 AND COMMONLY KNOWN AS THE KING JAMES VERSION ...

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life -- 2. (For the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and shew unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us;) -- 3 That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ -- 4. And these things write we unto you, that your joy may be full -- 5. This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all -- 6. If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth -- 7 But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin....

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Excerpt: Preface to Major Barbara: First Aid to Critics by George Bernard Shaw.

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Excerpt: The Divine Comedy, Volume One, Hell [The Inferno] by Dante Aligheri, trans Charles Eliot Norton.

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Contents INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................7 AIDS TO THE STUDY OF THE DIVINE COMEDY .......................................................... 14 HELL .............................................................................. 16 CANTO I. Dante, astray in a wood, reaches the foot of a hill which he begins to ascend; he is hindered by three beasts; he turns back and is met by Virgil, who proposes to guide him into the eternal world. ....................................... 16 CANTO II. Dante, doubtful of his own powers, is discouraged at the outset.?Virgil cheers him by telling him that he has been sent to his aid by a blessed Spirit from Heaven.?Dante casts off fear, and the poets proceed. ................ 19 CANTO III. The gate of Hell.?Virgil lends Dante in.?The punishment of the neither good nor bad.?Aeheron, and the sinners on its bank.?Charon.?Earthquake.?Dante swoons. ................................................................. 22 CANTO IV. The further side of Acheron.?Virgil leads Dante into Limbo, the First Circle of Hell, cont...

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Excerpt: ACT I. (SCENE.--A large room looking upon a garden door in the left-hand wall, and two in the right. In the middle of the room, a round table with chairs set about it, and books, magazines and newspapers upon it. In the foreground on the left, a window, by which is a small sofa with a work-table in front of it. At the back the room opens into a conservatory rather smaller than the room. From the right-hand side of this, a door leads to the garden. Through the large panes of glass that form the outer wall of the conservatory, a gloomy fjord landscape can be discerned, half-obscured by steady rain....

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Excerpt: Overruled by George Bernard Shaw.

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. Princess Shtcherbatskaya considered that it was out of the question for the wedding to take place before Lent, just five weeks off, since not half the trousseau could possibly be ready by that time. But she could not but agree with Levin that to fix it for after Lent would be putting it off too late, as an old aunt of Prince Shtcherbatsky?s was seriously ill and might die, and then the mourning would delay the wedding still longer. And therefore, deciding to divide the trousseau into two parts--a larger and smaller trousseau--the princess consented to have the wedding before Lent. She determined that she would get the smaller part of the trousseau all ready now, and the larger part should be made later, and she was much vexed with Levin because he was incapable of giving her a serious answer to the question whether he agreed to this arrangement or not. The arrangement was the more suitable as, immediately after the wedding, the young people were to go to the country, where the more important part of the trousseau would not be wanted....

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Excerpt: This little play is really a religious tract in dramatic form. If our silly censorship would permit its performance, it might possibly help to set right-side-up the perverted conscience and re-invigorate the starved self-respect of our considerable class of loose-lived playgoers whose point of honor is to deride all official and conventional sermons....

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Excerpt: Renewal of Life by Transmission. The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone attempt to react in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow, much less so as to render the blow a contributing factor to its own continued action....

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Contents Chapter One: Education as a Necessity of Life .............................................................................. 5 Chapter Two: Education as a Social Function .............................................................................. 14 Chapter Three: Education as Direction ........................................................................................ 28 Chapter Four: Education as Growth ............................................................................................. 46 Chapter Five: Preparation, Unfolding, and Formal Discipline................................................... 58 Chapter Six: Education as Conservative and Progressive ........................................................... 74 Chapter Seven: The Democratic Conception in Education ......................................................... 85 Chapter Eight: Aims in Education .............................................................................................. 105 Chapter Nine: Natural Development and Social Efficiency as Aims.........................................116 Chapter Ten: Interest and Discipline ......

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Excerpt: War and Peace: Book Thirteen by Leo Tolstoy.

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Introduction: Francois Marie Arouet, who called himself Voltaire, was the son of Francois Arouet of Poitou, who lived in Paris, had given up his office of notary two years before the birth of this his third son, and obtained some years afterwards a treasurer?s office in the Chambre des Comptes. Voltaire was born in the year 1694. He lived until within ten or eleven years of the outbreak of the Great French Revolution, and was a chief leader in the movement of thought that preceded the Revolution. Though he lived to his eighty-fourth year, Voltaire was born with a weak body....

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Contents LETTER I.?ON THE QUAKERS .............................................................................................................................. 6 LETTER II.?ON THE QUAKERS .......................................................................................................................... 10 LETTER III.?ON THE QUAKERS ......................................................................................................................... 12 LETTER IV.?ON THE QUAKERS......................................................................................................................... 16 LETTER V.?ON THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND .................................................................................................. 20 LETTER VI.?ON THE PRESBYTERIANS............................................................................................................ 23 LETTER VII.?ON THE SOCINIANS, OR ARIANS, OR ANTITRINITARIANS ............................................. 24 LETTER VIII.?ON THE PARLIAMENT ............................................................................................................... ...