Excerpt Details
Excerpt: When we think of the enormous number of volumes that have been published on the question as to where Hannibal crossed the Alps, without our being able to decide to-day whether it was (according to Whittaker and Rivaz) by Lyon, Geneva, the Great Saint-Bernard, and the valley of Aosta....

Excerpt Details
Excerpt: Autobiography of a Pocket-Handkerchief by James Fenimore Cooper.

Excerpt Details
Excerpt: Typhoon by Joseph Conrad.

Excerpt Details
Excerpt: A girl came out of lawyer Royall?s house, at the end of the one street of North Dormer, and stood on the doorstep. It was the beginning of a June afternoon. The springlike transparent sky shed a rain of silver sunshine on the roofs of the village, and on the pastures and larchwoods surrounding it. A little wind moved among the round white clouds on the shoulders of the hills, driving their shadows across the fields and down the grassy road that takes the name of street when it passes through North Dormer....

Excerpt Details
Excerpt: He was working on the edge of the common, beyond the small brook that ran in the dip at the bottom of the garden, carrying the garden path in continuation from the plank bridge on to the common. He had cut the rough turf and bracken, leaving the grey, dryish soil bare. But he was worried because he could not get the path straight, there was a pleat between his brows. He had set up his sticks, and taken the sights between the big pine trees, but for some reason everything seemed wrong. He looked again, straining his keen blue eyes, that had a touch of the Viking in them, through the shadowy pine trees as through a doorway, at the greengrassed garden-path rising from the shadow of alders by the log bridge up to the sunlit flowers. Tall white and purple columbines, and the butt-end of the old Hampshire cottage that crouched near the earth amid flowers, blossoming in the bit of shaggy wildness round about....

Table of Contents Details
Contents England, My England ........................................................................................................................ 4 Tickets, Please .................................................................................................................................. 35 The Blind Man ................................................................................................................................. 47 Monkey Nuts .................................................................................................................................... 66 Wintry Peacock ................................................................................................................................ 79 You Touched Me............................................................................................................................... 93 Samson and Delilah........................................................................................................................110 The Primrose Path ........................................................................................................

Excerpt Details
Excerpt: No Thoroughfare by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins.

Excerpt Details
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....

Excerpt Details
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....

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

Excerpt Details
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....

Excerpt Details
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....

Excerpt Details
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....

Table of Contents Details
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...

Excerpt Details
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...

Table of Contents Details
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 ....................

Excerpt Details
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....

Table of Contents Details
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 ..............................................

Excerpt Details
Excerpt: The Tragedie of Titus Andronicus; Actus Primus -- Scoena Prima -- Flourish. Enter the Tribunes and Senators aloft And then enter Saturninus and his Followers at one doore, and Bassianus and his Followers at the other, with Drum & Colours. Saturninus. Noble Patricians, Patrons of my right, Defend the justice of my Cause with Armes. And Countreymen, my loving Followers, Pleade my Successive Title with your Swords. I was the first borne Sonne, that was the last That wore the Imperiall Diadem of Rome: Then let my Fathers Honours live in me, Nor wrong mine Age with this indignitie. Bassianus. Romaines, Friends, Followers, Favourers of my Right: If ever Bassianus, Caesars Sonne, Were gracious in the eyes of Royall Rome, Keepe then this passage to the Capitoll: And suffer not Dishonour to approach Th? Imperiall Seate to Vertue: consecrate To Justice, Continence, and Nobility: But let Desert in pure Election shine; And Romanes, fight for Freedome in your Choice. Enter Marcus Andronicus aloft with the Crowne. Princes, that strive by Factions, and by Friends, Ambitiously for Rule and Empery: Know, that the people of Rome for whom we ...

Table of Contents Details
Table of Contents: The Tragedie of Titus Andronicus, 1 -- Actus Primus. Scoena Prima., 1 -- Actus Secunda., 13 -- Actus Tertius., 25 -- Actus Quartus., 34 -- Actus Quintus., 47...

Excerpt Details
Preface: A preface to the first edition of Jane Eyre being unnecessary, I gave none: this second edition demands a few words both of acknowledgment and miscellaneous remark. My thanks are due in three quarters. To the Public, for the indulgent ear it has inclined to a plain tale with few pretensions. To the Press, for the fair field its honest suffrage has opened to an obscure aspirant. To my Publishers, for the aid their tact, their energy, their practical sense and frank liberality have afforded an unknown and unrecommended author....

Excerpt Details
Excerpt: The commercial traveler, a personage unknown to antiquity, is one of the striking figures created by the manners and customs of our present epoch. May he not, in some conceivable order of things, be destined to mark for coming philosophers the great transition which welds a period of material enterprise to the period of intellectual strength? Our century will bind the realm of isolated power, abounding as it does in creative genius, to the realm of universal but leveling might; equalizing all products, spreading them broadcast among the masses, and being itself controlled by the principle of unity,--the final expression of all societies. Do we not find the dead level of barbarism succeeding the saturnalia of popular thought and the last struggles of those civilizations which accumulated the treasures of the world in one direction?...

Excerpt Details
Introduction: Immediately after Lincoln?s re-election to the Presidency, in an off-hand speech, delivered in response to a serenade by some of his admirers on the evening of November 10, 1864, he spoke as follows: ?It has long been a grave question whether any government not too strong for the liberties of its people can be strong enough to maintain its existence in great emergencies. On this point, the present rebellion brought our republic to a severe test, and the Presidential election, occurring in regular course during the rebellion, added not a little to the strain?. The strife of the election is but human nature practically applied to the facts in the case....

Excerpt Details
Excerpt: Chapter 1. A bright spring day was fading into evening. High overhead in the clear heavens small rosy clouds seemed hardly to move across the sky but to be sinking into its depths of blue. In a handsome house in one of the outlying streets of the government town of O---- (it was in the year 1842) two women were sitting at an open window; one was about fifty, the other an old lady of seventy....

Excerpt Details
Introduction: In an issue of the London World in April, 1890, there appeared the following paragraph: ?Two small rooms connected by a tiny hall afford sufficient space to contain Mr. Rudyard Kipling, the literary hero of the present hour, ?the man who came from nowhere,? as he says himself, and who a year ago was consciously nothing in the literary world.?...

Table of Contents Details
Contents At the Golden Gate ..................................................... 5 American Politics ....................................................... 18 American Salmon ...................................................... 29 The Yellowstone ........................................................ 37 Chicago ..................................................................... 46 The American Army ................................................... 55 America?s Defenceless Coasts ................................. 60...

Excerpt Details
Excerpt: The third section of the ?Act further to promote the efficiency of the Navy,? approved 21st of December, 1861, provides: ?That the President of the United States by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall have the authority to detail from the retired list of the navy for the command of squadrons and single ships such officers as he may believe that the good of the service requires to be thus placed in command; and such officers may, if upon the recommendation of the President of the United States they shall receive a vote of thanks of Congress for their services and gallantry in action against an enemy, be restored to the active list, and not otherwise.?...