Booklife: 73 books

By THE light of a tallow candle, which had been placed on one end of a rough table, a man was reading something written in a book. It was an old account book, greatly worn; and the writing was not, apparently, very legible, for the man sometimes held the page close to the flame of the candle to get...

The Science of Anthropology can speak, with some confidence, on many questions of Mythology. Materials are abundant and practically undisputed, because, as to their myths, savage races have spoken out with freedom. Myth represents, now the early scientific, now the early imaginative and humorous faculty,...

That is the question which Mrs. Ward, replying to some doubts and queries of an American friend, has undertaken to answer in this series of letters, and every one who reads them will admit that her answer is as complete and triumphant as it is thrilling. Nobody but a woman, an Englishwoman of warm...

On the day I was born we bought six hair–bottomed chairs, and in our little house it was an event, the first great victory in a woman's long campaign; how they had been laboured for, the pound–note and the thirty threepenny–bits they cost, what anxiety there was about the purchase, the show...

In the middle years of the nineteenth century there first became abundant in this strange world of ours a class of men, men tending for the most part to become elderly, who are called, and who are very properly called, but who dislike extremely to be called—"Scientists." They dislike that...

Jimmy Staunton's soldier servant smiled tolerantly behind a large hand as he produced the fourth evening collar for his master's inspection. Three had already been hurled into a corner, with oaths and curses, as unfit for a chimney–sweep to wear, and he waited patiently for the verdict on the last. "What...

No one but myself knows what I have suffered, nor what my books have gained, by your unsleeping watchfulness and admirable pertinacity. And now here is a volume that goes into the world and lacks your imprimatur: a strange thing in our joint lives; and the reason of it stranger still! I have watched...

The following tale was taken down from Mr. Stevenson’s dictation by his stepdaughter and amanuensis, Mrs. Strong, at intervals between January 1893 and October 1894 (see Vailima Letters, pp. 242–246, 299, 324 and 350). About six weeks before his death he laid the story aside to take up Weir of Hermiston....

"We are no other than a moving row Of Magic Shadow–shapes that come and go." —Omar Khayyam The horror first took concrete form amid that most unconcrete of all things—a hashish dream. I was off on a timeless, spaceless journey through the strange lands that belong to this state...

TRUE!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How,...

It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader. The sky was so starry, so bright that, looking at it, one could not help asking oneself whether ill–humoured and capricious people could live under such a sky. That is a youthful question too, dear reader,...

His native land! Home! The ship glided slowly up the Narrows; and from its deck Daren Lane saw the noble black outline of the Statue of Liberty limned against the clear gold of sunset. A familiar old pang in his breast—longing and homesickness and agony, together with the physical burn of...

England has in this war reached a height of achievement loftier than that which she attained in the struggle with Napoleon; and she has reached that height in a far shorter period. Her giant effort, crowned with a success as wonderful as the effort itself, is worthily described by the author of this...

When the Sleeper Wakes, whose title I have now altered to The Sleeper Awakes, was first published as a book in 1899 after a serial appearance in the Graphic and one or two American and colonial periodicals. It is one of the most ambitious and least satisfactory of my books, and I have taken the opportunity...