Category: General
William Shakespeare – Venus and Adonis
EVEN as the sun with purple-colour’d face Had ta’en his last leave of the weeping morn, Rose-cheek’d Adonis hied him to the chase; Hunting he loved, but love he laugh’d to scorn; Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him, And like a bold-faced suitor ‘gins to woo him. ‘Thrice-fairer than myself,’ thus she began, ‘The field’s […]
William Shakespeare – To the Queen
William Morris – A Dream of John Ball
Sometimes I am rewarded for fretting myself so much about present matters by a quite unasked-for pleasant dream. I mean when I am asleep. This dream is as it were a present of an architectural peepshow. I see some beautiful and noble building new made, as it were for the occasion, as clearly as if […]
William Makepeace Thackeray – The Book of Snobs
There are relative and positive Snobs. I mean by positive, such persons as are Snobs everywhere, in all companies, from morning till night, from youth to the grave, being by Nature endowed with Snobbishness—and others who are Snobs only in certain circumstances and relations of life. For instance: I once knew a man who committed […]
William Law – The Absolute Unlawfulness of the Stage-Entertainment
I am sensible that the Title of this little Book will, to the Generality of People, seem too high a Flight; that it will be looked upon as the Effect of a fanatical Spirit, carrying Matters higher than the Sobriety of Religion requires. I have only one Thing to ask of such People, that they […]
William Langland – Piers Plowman
William James – The Varieties of Religious Experience
It is with no small amount of trepidation that I take my place behind this desk, and face this learned audience. To us Americans, the experience of receiving instruction from the living voice, as well as from the books, of European scholars, is very familiar. At my own University of Harvard, not a winter passes […]
Willa Cather – The Professors House
Virginia Woolf – To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf – The Waves
Virginia Woolf – The Voyage Out
As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it is better not to walk down them arm-in-arm. If you persist, lawyers’ clerks will have to make flying leaps into the mud; young lady typists will have to fidget behind you. In the streets of London where beauty goes unregarded, […]
Virginia Woolf – Orlando
Virginia Woolf – Night and Day
It was a Sunday evening in October, and in common with many other young ladies of her class, Katharine Hilbery was pouring out tea. Perhaps a fifth part of her mind was thus occupied, and the remaining parts leapt over the little barrier of day which interposed between Monday morning and this rather subdued moment, […]
Virginia Woolf – Mrs Dalloway
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach. What a lark! What a plunge! For so it […]
Virginia Woolf – Jacobs Room
“So of course,” wrote Betty Flanders, pressing her heels rather deeper in the sand, “there was nothing for it but to leave.” Slowly welling from the point of her gold nib, pale blue ink dissolved the full stop; for there her pen stuck; her eyes fixed, and tears slowly filled them. The entire bay quivered; […]
Virginia Woolf – A Room of Ones Own
Virgil – The Aeneid of Virgil (I-VI)
Tobias Smollett – Travels through France and Italy
Many pens have been burnished this year of grace for the purpose of celebrating with befitting honour the second centenary of the birth of Henry Fielding; but it is more than doubtful if, when the right date occurs in March 1921, anything like the same alacrity will be shown to commemorate one who was for […]
Thomas Watson – The Beatitudes
Christian Reader, I here present you with a subject full of sweet variety. This Sermon of Christ on the Mount is a piece of spiritual needlework, wrought with divers colors. Here is both usefulness and sweetness. In this portion of Holy Scripture, you have a summary of true religion—the Bible epitomized. Here is a garden […]