May Byron: 6 books

"IN a beautiful part of beautiful Somerset, where the "soft orchard and cottage scenery" is dimpled between blue hillslopes, where meadows and woods and translucent streams compete with each other in charm,—in the lovely region of the Quantock hills, lies the quiet little market-village...

"About eight o'clock one morning in early summer, a young man may be seen sauntering to and from in the garden of Wentworth Place, Hampstead. Wentworth Place consists of two houses only; in the first, John Keats is established along with his friend Charles Armitage Brown. The second is inhabited...

It is an April morning in 1844, in the town of Leipzig,—calm, cool, and fraught with exquisite promise of a prolific spring,—when the Herr Professor Doctor Robert Schumann, rising before six o'clock as is his wont, very quietly and noiselessly in his soft felt slippers, dresses and goes downstairs....

"About six o'clock on a midsummer morning in 1877, a tall old man awoke, and was out of bed next moment,—but he moved with a certain slow leisureliness, as one who will not be hurried. The reason of this deliberate movement was obvious,—he had to drag a paralysed leg, which was only gradually...

"Breakfast, in 1599, was a rite "more honoured in the breach than in the observance." Most people, having supped with exceeding heartiness the previous night, ignored breakfast altogether: especially as dinner would occur some time between 10 and 12 a.m. Those who could not go long...

"About four o'clock on a September morning of 1665,—when the sun was not yet shining upon his windows facing the Artillery Fields, and the autumnal dew lay wet upon his garden leaves,—John Milton awoke with his customary punctuality, and, true to his austere and abstemious mode of life, wasted...