Classic Articles on Writing

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…

I offer no apology for entreating the attention of the readers of The Daily News to an effort which has been making for some three years and a half, and which is making now, to introduce among the most miserable and neglected outcasts in London, some knowledge of the commonest principles of morality and religion;…

IN DEFENSE OF BOOKS by John Milton I deny not, but that it is of greatest concernment in the Church and Commonwealth, to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors. For books are not absolutely dead things,…

The first person who compared painting and poetry with one another was a man of refined feeling, who became aware of a similar effect produced upon himself by both arts. He felt both represent what is absent as if it were present, and appearance as if it were reality; that both deceived, and that the…