Author: Richard

POEMS IN PROSE by Oscar Wilde THE ARTIST ONE evening there came into his soul the desire to fashion an image of THE PLEASURE THAT ABIDETH FOR A MOMENT. And he went forth into the world to look for bronze. For he could think only in bronze. But all the bronze of the whole world…

One has the leisure of July for perceiving all the differences of the green of leaves. It is no longer a difference in degrees of maturity, for all the trees have darkened to their final tone, and stand in their differences of character and not of mere date. Almost all the green is grave, not…

  Most of us, mere men that we are, find ourselves caught in some entanglement of our mortal coil even before we have fairly embarked upon the enterprise of thinking our case through. The art of self-reflection which appeals to us as so eminent and so human, is it after all much more than a…

Visions and magic spells, can you despise, And laugh at witches, ghosts, and prodigies? Going yesterday to dine with an old acquaintance, I had the misfortune to find his whole family very much dejected.  Upon asking him the occasion of it, he told me that his wife had dreamt a very strange dream the night…

Of Wisdom For A Man’s Self by Francis Bacon AN ANT is a wise creature for itself, but it is a shrewd thing, in an orchard or garden. And certainly, men that are great lovers of themselves, waste the public. Divide with reason; between selflove and society; and be so true to thyself, as thou…

TO M. O. MENSHIKOV. YALTA, January 28, 1900. … I can’t make out what Tolstoy’s illness is. Tcherinov has sent me no answer, and from what I read in the papers and what you write me now I can draw no conclusion. Ulcers in the stomach and intestines would give different indications: they are not…

A Review of Hamlet by WILLIAM HAZLITT It is the one of Shakespeare’s plays that we think of the oftenest, because it sounds most in striking reflections on human life, and because the distresses of Hamlet are transferred, by the turn of his mind, to the general account of humanity. Whatever happens to him, we…

Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson “Ne te quaesiveris extra.” “Man is his own star; and the soul that can Render an honest and a perfect man, Commands all light, all influence, all fate; Nothing to him falls early or too late. Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk…

THE COURTSHIP OF MILES STANDISH The introduction and acclimatization of the hexameter upon English soil has been an affair of more than two centuries. The attempt was first systematically made during the reign of Elizabeth, but the metre remained a feeble exotic that scarcely burgeoned under glass. Gabriel Harvey,—a kind of Don Adriano de Armado,—whose…

Charles Dickens, in a note now lying before me, alluding to an examination I once made of the mechanism of Barnaby Rudge, says—”By the way, are you aware that Godwin wrote his Caleb Williams backwards? He first involved his hero in a web of difficulties, forming the second volume, and then, for the first, cast…

What I Think of Leo Tolstoy by William Dean Howells I come now, though not quite in the order of time, to the noblest of all these enthusiasms—namely, my devotion for the writings of Leo Tolstoy. I should wish to speak of him with his own incomparable truth, yet I do not know how to…