George Payne Rainsford James: 59 books

It is wonderful what improvements have taken place in clocks and watches during the last half-century; how accurately the escapements are constructed, how delicately the springs are formed, how easily the wheels move, and what good time they keep. After all, society is but a clock, a very complicated...

Let me take you into an old-fashioned country house, built by architects of the early reign of James the First. It had all the peculiarities--I might almost say the oddities--of that particular epoch in the building art. Chimneys innumerable had it. Heaven only knows what rooms they ventilated; but their...

One of the finest characters in the world was the old English merchant. We may and have improved upon many things, but not upon that. A different spirit reigns in commerce from that which ruled it long ago, and not a better one. We are more the shopkeeper, as a celebrated but not a great man called...

The eye of the traveller, however, on the London road, in tracing this stream farther up, came upon a clump of tall old trees disencumbered of all brushwood, spreading wide at the top, but ungarnished by boughs or green leaves below, and affording habitation to a multitude of busy rooks, whose inharmonious...

It was on the evening of a beautiful day in the beginning of September, 1456--one of those fair autumn days that wean us, as it were, from the passing summer, with the light as bright, and the sky as full of rays, as in the richest hours of June; and with nothing but a scarce perceptible shade of yellow...

The realities of the world are few and small; the illusions many and vast. Not a sense that we possess, and hardly a faculty of the mind, but serves to deceive us; wholly in some cases, and partially in all. Yet, strip nature and life of these deceits, and what would earth become?--what our existence...

It is difficult to discover what are the exact sources from which spring the thrilling feelings of joy and satisfaction with which we look back to the days of our early youth, and to the scenes in which our infancy was passed. It matters not, or at least very little, what are the pleasures to which we...

Most cities are hateful; and, without any disposition to "babble about green fields," it must be owned that each is more or less detestable. Nevertheless, among them all, there is none to be compared, as a whole, to London--none which comprehends within itself, from various causes, so much of the sublime...

Among all the many fine and beautiful figures and modes of reasoning that the universe in which we dwell has afforded for the illustration of the bright hope that is within us of a life renewed beyond the tomb, there is none more beautiful or more exquisite, that I know of, than that which is derived...

There is a mountain pass, not far from the shores of the Lago Maggiore, which has been famous of late years for anything but fêtes and festivals. There, many an unfortunate traveller has been relieved of the burden of worldly wealth, and sometimes of all earthly cares; and there, many a postillion has...

There is a small town in one of the remote provinces of France, about ten miles from the sea shore, and two or three hundred from the capital, on the appearance of which it may be as well to dwell for a short time; noticing not alone its houses and its streets as they appeared in the seventeenth century,...

On the morning of the 24th day of March, 1520, a traveller was seen riding in the small, rugged cross-road which, traversing the eastern part of Kent, formed the immediate communication between Wye and Canterbury. Far be it from me to insinuate that this road pursued anything like a direct course from...

The house was a neat, though a lowly one. It bore traces of newness, for the bark on the trunks which supported the little veranda had not yet mouldered away. Nevertheless, it was not built by the owner's own hands; for when he came there he had much to learn in the rougher arts of life; but with a carpenter...

On the 15th of August, 1599, a young man was seen standing on one of the little bridges in the town of Padua. He was plainly dressed in an ordinary riding habit of that period, having a short black cloak over his shoulders, a tawny suit of cloth below, and a high crowned hat with a plume of feathers...