Classic Articles on Writing

WOMAN IN FRANCE: MADAME DE SABLÉ  by George Eliot In 1847, a certain Count Leopold Ferri died at Padua, leaving a library entirely composed of works written by women, in various languages, and this library amounted to nearly 32,000 volumes.  We will not hazard any conjecture as to the proportion of these volumes which a…

A Look at Poets and Poetry of the 1800s from 1888  by William Davenport Adams The succession of the Hon. J. Leicester Warren to the barony of De Tabley was something more than a change in the personnel of the House of Lords; it amounted to a conspicuous addition to the Chamber’s intellectual power, and…

Alpine Diversions by Robert Louis Stevenson There will be no lack of diversion in an Alpine sanitarium.  The place is half English, to be sure, the local sheet appearing in double column, text and translation; but it still remains half German; and hence we have a band which is able to play, and a company…

“Me, already, as the tragic poet would say, the voice of fate calls. Soon I must drink the poison; and I think that I had better repair to the bath first, in order that the women may not have the trouble of washing my body after I am dead.” When he had done speaking, Crito…

The Death of My Wife by Mark Twain To-morrow will be the thirty-sixth anniversary of our marriage. My wife passed from this life one year and eight months ago, in Florence, Italy, after an unbroken illness of twenty-two months’ duration. I saw her first in the form of an ivory miniature in her brother Charley’s…

Ovid, Met. i. 355. We two are a multitude. One would think that the larger the company is, in which we are engaged, the greater variety of thoughts and subjects would be started in discourse; but instead of this, we find that conversation is never so much straitened and confined as in numerous assemblies.  When…

CHICAGO by Rudyard Kipling     “I know thy cunning and thy greed, Thy hard high lust and wilful deed, And all thy glory loves to tell Of specious gifts material.” I HAVE struck a city—a real city—and they call it Chicago. The other places do not count. San Francisco was a pleasure-resort as well as…

When I Knew Stephen Crane by Willa Cather It was, I think, in the spring of ’94 that a slender, narrow-chested fellow in a shabby grey suit, with a soft felt hat pulled low over his eyes, sauntered into the office of the managing editor of the Nebraska State Journal and introduced himself as Stephen…

The centre of our studies, the goal of our thoughts, the point to which all paths lead and the point from which all paths start again, is to be found in Rome and her abiding power.—Freeman. Few students of mankind, if truly impartial, can fail to select as the greatest of human institutions that mighty…

AN AUTUMN EFFECT by Robert Louis Stevenson (1875) A country rapidly passed through under favourable auspices may leave upon us a unity of impression that would only be disturbed and dissipated if we stayed longer.  Clear vision goes with the quick foot.  Things fall for us into a sort of natural perspective when we see…

Poetry (I am clear) is eligible of something far more ripen’d and ample, our lands and pending days, than it has yet produced from any utterance old or new. Modern or new poetry, too, (viewing or challenging it with severe criticism,) is largely a-void—while the very cognizance, or even suspicion of that void, and the…

Why The Blind Man in Ancient Times was Made a Poet  by William B. Yeats A description in the Iliad or the Odyssey, unlike one in the Æneid or in most modern writers, is the swift and natural observation of a man as he is shaped by life. It is a refinement of the primary…

OF A BOOK UNWRITTEN by H. G. Wells Accomplished literature is all very well in its way, no doubt, but much more fascinating to the contemplative man are the books that have not been written. These latter are no trouble to hold; there are no pages to turn over. One can read them in bed…

To the Editor of the Spectator. SIR:—Your article on ‘Landscape and Literature’ in the Spectator of June 18th has the following, among other suggestive passages:—“But whence came the vision of the enchanted island in the ‘Tempest’? It had no existence in Shakspere’s world, but was woven out of such stuff as dreams are made of.”…

RUPERT BROOKE: by Henry James Nothing more generally or more recurrently solicits us, in the light of literature, I think, than the interest of our learning how the poet, the true poet, and above all the particular one with whom we may for the moment be concerned, has come into his estate, asserted and preserved…