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Excerpt: No Thoroughfare by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins.

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Excerpt: In the eleven years that separated the Declaration of the Independence of the United States from the completion of that act in the ordination of our written Constitution, the great minds of America were bent upon the study of the principles of government that were essential to the preservation of the liberties which had been won at great cost and with heroic labors and sacrifices. Their studies were conducted in view of the imperfections that experience had developed in the government of the Confederation, and they were, therefore, practical and thorough....

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Excerpt: Advertisement. The story of ?Catherine,? which appeared in Fraser?s Magazine in 1839-40, was written by Mr. Thackeray, under the name of Ikey Solomons, Jun., to counteract the injurious influence of some popular fictions of that day, which made heroes of highwaymen and burglars, and created a false sympathy for the vicious and criminal....

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Excerpt: THE PREFACE; If ever the story of any private Man?s Adventures in the World were worth making Publick, and were acceptable when Publish?d, the Editor of this Account thinks this will be so. The Wonders of this Man?s Life exceed all that (he thinks)is to be found extant; the Life of one Man being scarce capable of a greater Variety. The Story is told with Modesty, with Seriousness, and with a religious Application of Events to the Uses to which wise Men always apply them (viz.) to the Instruction of others by this Example, and to justify and honour the Wisdom of Providence in all the Variety of our Circumstances, let them happen how they will. The Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it: And however thinks, because all such things are dispatch?d, that the Improvement of it, as well to the Diversion, as to the Instruction of the Reader, will be the same; and as such, he thinks, without father Compliment to the World, he does them a great Service in the Publication....

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Table of Contents: THE PREFACE, 1 -- THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF ROBINSON CRUSOE, &c., 2 -- THE JOURNAL., 51

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Excerpt: It was about the beginning of September, 1664, that I, mong the rest of my neighbors, heard in ordinary dis course that the plague was returned again in Holland; for it had been very violent there, and particularly at Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in the year 1663, whither, they say, it was brought, some said from Italy, others from the Levant, among some goods which were brought home by their Turkey fleet; others said it was brought from Candia; others from Cyprus. It mattered not from whence it came; but all agreed it was come into Holland again....

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Excerpt: Welcome to the fifth volume of Best of Four. We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we have enjoyed bringing it to you. The purpose of Best of Four is to bring the best writing produced in English 004 each fall semester to the widest audience possible. Our students have important stories to tell and powerful voices to be heard. The students who read these essays will learn that they too have permission to state what is important to them in a public voice....

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Contents How to Use This Magazine .............................................................................................................. 3 High School to College Andrew Makhoul ........................................................................................ 4 Ignoring Problems Creates More! Ashley Morris................................................................................ 5 Hang in There Brad Hart ................................................................................................................. 6 Nate Brandi Saveri ........................................................................................................................... 7 The Best Birthday Is the Sixteenth Brent Heimbach ......................................................................... 9 Sharing the Bread of Angels Christa Sist ......................................................................................... 10 Tragedy in the Night Danielle Gehman .......................................................................................... 11 My Grandfather David Smith ..............................................

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Introduction: Benjamin Franklin was born in Milk Street, Boston, on January 6, 1706. His father, Josiah Franklin, was a tallow chandler who married twice, and of his seventeen children Benjamin was the youngest son. His schooling ended at ten, and at twelve he was bound apprentice to his brother James, a printer, who published the ?New England Courant.? To this journal he became a contributor, and later was for a time its nominal editor....

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Excerpt: Preface By Way Of Criticism. These studies are collected from the monthly press. One appeared in the New Quarterly, one in MacMillan?s, and the rest in the Cornhill Magazine. To the Cornhill I owe a double debt of thanks; first, that I was received there in the very best society, and under the eye of the very best of editors; and second, that the proprietors have allowed me to republish so considerable an amount of copy....

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Contents PREFACE BY WAY OF CRITICISM. ........................................................................................... 4 CHAPTER I ? VICTOR HUGO?S ROMANCES ........................................................................ 15 CHAPTER II ? SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS.......................................................... 34 CHAPTER III ? WALT WHITMAN............................................................................................. 63 CHAPTER IV ? HENRY DAVID THOREAU: HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS........... 84 CHAPTER V ? YOSHIDA-TORAJIRO..................................................................................... 107 CHAPTER VI ? FRANCOIS VILLON, STUDENT, POET, AND HOUSEBREAKER.........117 CHAPTER VII ? CHARLES OF ORLEANS ............................................................................ 141 CHAPTER VIII ? SAMUEL PEPYS .......................................................................................... 170 CHAPTER IX ? JOHN KNOX AND HIS RELATIONS TO WOMEN .................................. 190...

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. The Foreigner At Home. ?This is no my ain house; I ken by the biggin? o?t.? Two recent books* one by Mr. Grant White on England, one on France by the diabolically clever Mr. Hillebrand, may well have set people thinking on the divisions of races and nations. Such thoughts should arise with particular congruity and force to inhabitants of that United Kingdom, peopled from so many different stocks, babbling so many different dialects, and offering in its extent such singular contrasts, from the busiest over-population to the unkindliest desert, from the Black Country to the Moor of Rannoch. It is not only when we cross the seas that we go abroad; there are foreign parts of England; and the race that has conquered so wide an empire has not yet managed to assimilate the islands whence she sprang. Ireland, Wales, and the Scottish mountains still cling, in part, to their old Gaelic speech. It was but the other day that English triumphed in Cornwall, and they still show in Mousehole, on St. Michael?s Bay, the house of the last Cornish-speaking woman. English itself, which will now frank the traveller through the most of...

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Contents CHAPTER I: THE FOREIGNER AT HOME ..................................................................................... 5 CHAPTER II: SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES................................................................................ 14 CHAPTER III: OLD MORTALITY .................................................................................................. 20 CHAPTER IV: A COLLEGE MAGAZINE ...................................................................................... 28 CHAPTER V: AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER ............................................................................. 36 CHAPTER VI: PASTORAL .............................................................................................................. 41 CHAPTER VII: THE MANSE .......................................................................................................... 48 CHAPTER VIII: MEMOIRS OF AN ISLET .................................................................................... 53 CHAPTER IX: THOMAS STEVENSON ? CIVIL ENGINEER...................................................... 58 CHAPTER X: TALK AND TALKERS ....................

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Doctor Thorne is the third of Trollope's Barsetshire novels, and unlike some of the others, has little to do with the politics and personalities of the Church of England, or politics on the national level (though there is lots of politicking in the mythical county of Barsetshire itself). The plot revolves around the illegitimate Mary Thorne, who has been lovingly raised by her uncle, a country doctor, and who, as she comes of age, finds herself wondering whether she is a lady (in the county sense of the term). Frank Gresham, son of the squire of Greshamsbury, is in love with her (much against the wishes of his noble de Courcy relatives at the Castle), but she dismisses his affection at first as mere puppy love, thereby setting the scene for a series of entanglements, social, romantic, and of course, financial and propertied (never far from the action in Trollope's works). Their resolution, of course, makes up the meat of the novel. One critic has remarked that in Doctor Thorne Trollope succeeds in one of the most difficult tasks an author of fiction can face: how to make genuinely good people genuinely interesting, so that they enga...

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Literature

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Preface: It may save misunderstanding if a word or so be said here of the aim and scope of this book. It is written in relation to a previous work, Anticipations,* and together with that and a small pamphlet, ?The Discovery of the Future,?** presents a general theory of social development and of social and political conduct. It is an attempt to deal with social and political questions in a new way and from a new starting-point....

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Introduction: The Ethics of Aristotle is one half of a single treatise of which his Politics is the other half. Both deal with one and the same subject. This subject is what Aristotle calls in one place the ?philosophy of human affairs;? but more frequently Political or Social Science. In the two works taken together we have their author?s whole theory of human conduct or practical activity, that is, of all human activity which is not directed merely to knowledge or truth. The two parts of this treatise are mutually complementary, but in a literary sense each is independent and self-contained. The proem to the Ethics is an introduction to the whole subject, not merely to the first part; the last chapter of the Ethics points forward to the Politics, and sketches for that part of the treatise the order of enquiry to be pursued (an order which in the actual treatise is not adhered to)....

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Excerpt: After the disasters of the revolution of July, which destroyed so many aristocratic fortunes dependent on the court, Madame la Princesse de Cadignan was clever enough to attribute to political events the total ruin she had caused by her own extravagance. The prince left France with the royal family, and never returned to it, leaving the princess in Paris, protected by the fact of his absence; for their debts, which the sale of all their salable property had not been able to extinguish, could only be recovered through him. The revenues of the entailed estates had been seized. In short, the affairs of this great family were in as bad a state as those of the elder branch of the Bourbons....

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Excerpt: Preface to the 1857 edition. I have been occupied with this story, during many working hours of two years. I must have been very ill employed, if I could not leave its merits and demerits as a whole, to express themselves on its being read as a whole. But, as it is not unreasonable to suppose that I may have held its threads with a more continuous attention than anyone else can have given them during its desultory publication, it is not unreasonable to ask that the weaving may be looked at in its completed state, and with the pattern finished....

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CONTENTS Preface to the 1857 Edition BOOK THE FIRST: POVERTY 1. Sun and Shadow 2. Fellow Travellers 3. Home 4. Mrs Flintwinch has a Dream 5. Family Affairs 6. The Father of the Marshalsea 7. The Child of the Marshalsea 8. The Lock 9. little Mother 10. Containing the whole Science of Government 11. Let Loose 12. Bleeding Heart Yard 13. Patriarchal 14. Little Dorrit?s Party 15. Mrs Flintwinch has another Dream 16. Nobody?s Weakness 17. Nobody?s Rival 18. Little Dorrit?s Lover 19. The Father of the Marshalsea in two or three Relations 20. Moving in Society 21. Mr Merdle?s Complaint 22. A Puzzle 23. Machinery in Motion 24. Fortune-Telling 25. Conspirators and Others 26. Nobody?s State of Mind 27. Five-and-Twenty 28. Nobody?s Disappearance 29. Mrs Flintwinch goes on Dreaming 30. The Word of a Gentleman 31. Spirit 32. More Fortune-Telling...

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Excerpt: Dear Speed, yours of the 9th instant is duly received, which I do not meet as a ?bore,? but as a most welcome visitor. I will answer the business part of it first. In relation to our Congress matter here, you were right in supposing I would support the nominee. Neither Baker nor I, however, is the man, but Hardin, so far as I can judge from present appearances. We shall have no split or trouble about the matter; all will be harmony. In relation to the ?coming events? about which Butler wrote you, I had not heard one word before I got your letter; but I have so much confidence in the judgment of Butler on such a subject that I incline to think there may be some reality in it. What day does Butler appoint? By the way, how do ?events? of the same sort come on in your family? Are you possessing houses and lands, and oxen and asses, and men-servants and maid-servants, and begetting sons and daughters? We are not keeping house, but boarding at the Globe Tavern, which is very well kept now by a widow lady of the name of Beck....

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Excerpt: PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION; MUCH to the author?s surprise, and (if he may say so without additional offence) considerably to his amusement, he finds that his sketch of official life, introductory to THE SCARLET LETTER, has created an unprecedented excitement in the respectable community immediately around him. It could hardly have been more violent, indeed, had he burned down the Custom House, and quenched its last smoking ember in the blood of a certain venerable personage, against whom he is supposed to cherish a peculiar malevolence. As the public disapprobation would weigh very heavily on him, were he conscious of deserving it, the author begs leave to say, that he has carefully read over the introductory pages, with a purpose to alter or expunge whatever might be found amiss, and to make the best reparation in his power for the atrocities of which he has been adjudged guilty. But it appears to him, that the only remarkable features of the sketch are its frank and genuine good-humor, and the general accuracy with which he has conveyed his sincere impressions of the characters therein described. As to enmity, or ill f...

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Table of Contents: PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, 1 -- THE CUSTOM HOUSE INTRODUCTORY, 2 -- 1 THE PRISON DOOR, 31 -- 2 THE MARKET-PLACE, 33 -- 3 THE RECOGNITION, 40 -- 4 THE INTERVIEW, 47 -- 5 HESTER AT HER NEEDLE, 52 -- 6 PEARL, 59 -- 7 THE GOVERNOR?S HALL, 66 -- 8 THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER, 72 -- 9 THE LEECH, 79 -- 10 THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT, 87 -- 11 THE INTERIOR OF A HEART, 95 -- 12 THE MINISTER?S VIGIL, 100 -- 13 ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER, 108 -- 14 HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN, 114 -- 15 HESTER AND PEARL, 119 -- 16 A FOREST WALK, 124 -- 17 THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER, 129 -- 18 A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE, 136 -- 19 THE CHILD AT THE BROOKSIDE, 141 -- 20 THE MINISTER IN A MAZE, 147 -- 21 THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY, 155 -- 22 THE PROCESSION, 162 -- 23 THE REVELATION OF THE SCARLET LETTER, 170 -- 24 CONCLUSION, 177...

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Excerpt: Preface to the 1857 edition. I have been occupied with this story, during many working hours of two years. I must have been very ill employed, if I could not leave its merits and demerits as a whole, to express themselves on its being read as a whole. But, as it is not unreasonable to suppose that I may have held its threads with a more continuous attention than anyone else can have given them during its desultory publication, it is not unreasonable to ask that the weaving may be looked at in its completed state, and with the pattern finished....

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CONTENTS Preface to the 1857 Edition BOOK THE FIRST: POVERTY 1. Sun and Shadow 2. Fellow Travellers 3. Home 4. Mrs Flintwinch has a Dream 5. Family Affairs 6. The Father of the Marshalsea 7. The Child of the Marshalsea 8. The Lock 9. little Mother 10. Containing the whole Science of Government 11. Let Loose 12. Bleeding Heart Yard 13. Patriarchal 14. Little Dorrit?s Party 15. Mrs Flintwinch has another Dream 16. Nobody?s Weakness 17. Nobody?s Rival 18. Little Dorrit?s Lover 19. The Father of the Marshalsea in two or three Relations 20. Moving in Society 21. Mr Merdle?s Complaint 22. A Puzzle 23. Machinery in Motion 24. Fortune-Telling 25. Conspirators and Others 26. Nobody?s State of Mind 27. Five-and-Twenty 28. Nobody?s Disappearance 29. Mrs Flintwinch goes on Dreaming 30. The Word of a Gentleman 31. Spirit 32. More Fortune-Telling...

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Excerpt: Chapter 1; THE family of Dashwood had been long settled in Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property, where, for many generations, they had lived in so respectable a manner, as to engage the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance. The late owner of this estate was a single man, who lived to a very advanced age, and who for many years of his life, had a constant companion and housekeeper in his sister. But her death, which happened ten years before his own, produced a great alteration in his home; for to supply her loss, he invited and received into his house the family of his nephew Mr. Henry Dashwood, the legal inheritor of the Norland estate, and the person to whom he intended to bequeath it. In the society of his nephew and niece, and their children, the old Gentleman?s days were comfortably spent. His attachment to them all increased. The constant attention of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Dashwood to his wishes, which proceeded not merely from interest, but from goodness of heart, gave him every degree of solid comfort which his age could receive; and ...

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Table of Contents: I 1 -- Chapter 1, 3 -- Chapter 2, 6 -- Chapter 3, 10 -- Chapter 4, 13 -- Chapter 5, 17 -- Chapter 6, 19 -- Chapter 7, 22 -- Chapter 8, 24 -- Chapter 9, 27 -- Chapter 10, 31 -- Chapter 11, 35 -- Chapter 12, 38 -- Chapter 13, 42 -- Chapter 14, 47 -- Chapter 15, 50 -- Chapter 16, 55 -- Chapter 17, 60 -- Chapter 18, 64 -- Chapter 19, 67 -- Chapter 20, 73 -- Chapter 21, 78 -- Chapter 22, 84 -- II 91 -- Chapter 23, 93 -- Chapter 24, 97...

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Walt Whitman (1819-1892) is widely considered to be the greatest and most influential of all American poets. LEAVES OF GRASS, Whitman's sole book published at his own expense, represents almost the entirety of his poetical output. The first edition of LEAVES OF GRASS, which he would continue to revise over the course of his life expanding and rewriting it until the year of his death, appeared in 1855. This volume represents the final edition, commonly referred to as the “deathbed” edition, and comes with a prefatory note from Whitman asserting that this is the version he most considered full and complete. While it was a commercial and critical failure during Whitman’s lifetime, LEAVES OF GRASS has gone on to become one of the most canonical books of poetry ever written, influencing and inspiring countless artists in the last two centuries. Written in a groundbreaking prosodic style Whitman referred to as “free verse” LEAVES OF GRASS takes the individual and a young American democracy as its themes and illustrates them with a long-lined cadence Whitman coined his “barbaric yawp” along with all the details that constitute them, a few ...

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O Captain! My Captain! O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won, The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;                     But O heart! heart! heart!                          O the bleeding drops of red,                               Where on the deck my Captain lies,                                    Fallen cold and dead. O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells; Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills, For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding, For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;                     Here Captain! dear father!                          This arm beneath your head!                               It is some dream that on the deck,                                    You’ve fallen cold and dead.   My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still, My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will, The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed...

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Contents Introduction LEAVES OF GRASS INSCRIPTIONS One's-Self I Sing As I Ponder'd in Silence In Cabin'd Ships at Sea To Foriegn Lands To a Historian To Thee Old Cause Eidólons For Him I Sing When I Read the Book Beginning My Studies Beginners To the States On Journeys through the States To a Certain Cantatrice Me Imperturbe Savantism The Ship Starting I Hear America Singing What Place Is Besieged Still though the One I Sing Shut Not Your Doors Poets to Come To You Thou Reader STARTING FROM PAUMANOK SONG OF MYSELF CHILDREN OF ADAM To the Garden the World From Pent-Up Aching Rivers I Sing the Body Electric A Woman Waits for Me Spontaneous Me One Hour to Madness and Joy Out of the Rolling Ocean the Crowd Ages and Ages Returning at Intervals We Two, How Long We Were Fool'd O Hymen! O Hymenee! I Am He that Aches with Love Native Moments Once I Pass'd through a Populous City I Heard You Solemn-Sweet Pipes of the Organ Facing West from California's Shores As Adam Early in the Morning CALAMUS In Paths Untrodden Scented Herbage of My Breast Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand For Y...

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The work was composed between 1790 and 1793, in the period of radical foment and political conflict immediately after the French Revolution. The title is an ironic reference to Emanuel Swedenborg's theological work Heaven and Hell published in Latin 33 years earlier. Swedenborg is directly cited and criticized by Blake several places in the Marriage. Though Blake was influenced by his grand and mystical cosmic conception, Swedenborg's conventional moral structures and his Manichean view of good and evil led Blake to express a deliberately depolarized and unified vision of the cosmos in which the material world and physical desire are equally part of the divine order, hence, a marriage of heaven and hell. The book is written in prose, except for the opening Argument and the Song of Liberty. The book describes the poet's visit to Hell, a device adopted by Blake from Dante's Inferno and Milton's Paradise Lost....

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Literature, Philosophy, Satire, Poetry

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Noli Me Tangere (Latin for Touch Me Not) is a novel by the National Hero of the Philippines, Dr. José Rizal. It was originally written in Spanish, and first published in Germany in 1887. Noli Me Tangere exposed the corruption and abuse of the Spanish government and clergy towards the Philippine people and the ills of the Philippine society. This novel, and its sequel El Filibusterismo were banned in many parts of the Islands. Rizal was later arrested for inciting rebellion, based largely on his writings, and was excuted in Manila. Noli Me Tangere, and the execution of Rizal, indirectly influenced the Philippine revolution from Spain. Today, Noli Me Tangere is required reading in all Philippine Schools. (Summary by JoeD)...

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Literature, Politics

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Excerpt: The telephone bell rings with the petulant persistence that marks a trunk call, and I go in from some ineffectual gymnastics on the lawn to deal with the irruption. There is the usual trouble in connecting up, minute voices in Folkestone and Dover and London call to one another and are submerged by buzzings and throbbings. Then in elfin tones the real message comes through: ?Bleriot has crossed the Channel.... An article ... about what it means.?...

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Contents THE COMING OF BLRIOT ......................................................................................................... 5 MY FIRST FLIGHT........................................................................................................................ 10 OFF THE CHAIN........................................................................................................................... 15 OF THE NEW REIGN .................................................................................................................... 20 WILL THE EMPIRE LIVE? ......................................................................................................... 27 THE LABOUR UNREST................................................................................................................ 34 SOCIAL PANACEAS...................................................................................................................... 61 SYNDICALISM OR CITIZENSHIP............................................................................................. 66 THE GREAT STATE ..........................................................

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Excerpt: We present the narrative of this report and the recommendations that flow from it to the President of the United States, the United States Congress, and the American people for their consideration. Ten Commissioners--five Republicans and five Democrats chosen by elected leaders from our nation?s capital at a time of great partisan division--have come together to present this report without dissent....

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CONTENTS List of Illustrations and Tables ix Member List xi Staff List xiii?xiv Preface xv 1. ?WE HAVE SOME PLANES? 1 1.1 Inside the Four Flights 1 1.2 Improvising a Homeland Defense 14 1.3 National Crisis Management 35 2. THE FOUNDATION OF THE NEW TERRORISM 47 2.1 A Declaration of War 47 2.2 Bin Ladin?s Appeal in the Islamic World 48 2.3 The Rise of Bin Ladin and al Qaeda (1988?1992) 55 2.4 Building an Organization, Declaring War on the United States (1992?1996) 59 2.5 Al Qaeda?s Renewal in Afghanistan (1996?1998) 63 3. COUNTERTERRORISM EVOLVES 71 3.1 From the Old Terrorism to the New: The First World Trade Center Bombing 71 3.2 Adaptation?and Nonadaptation? . . . in the Law Enforcement Community 73 3.3 . . . and in the Federal Aviation Administration 82 3.4 . . . and in the Intelligence Community 86...