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Preface: A preface generally begins with a truism; and I may set out with the admission that it is not always expedient to bring to light the posthumous work of great writers. A man generally contrives to publish, during his lifetime, quite as much as the public has time or inclination to read; and his surviving friends are apt to show more zeal than discretion in dragging forth from his closed desk such undeveloped offspring of his mind as he himself had left to silence. Literature has never been redundant with authors who sincerely undervalue their own productions; and the sagacious critics who maintain that what of his own an author condemns must be doubly damnable, are, to say the least of it, as often likely to be right as wrong....

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Excerpt: Strictly speaking, there were only six poor travelers; but, being a Traveler myself, though an idle one, and being withal as poor as I hope to be, I brought the number up to seven. This word of explanation is due at once, for what says the inscription over the quaint old door?...

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Excerpt: Two Gentlemen of Verona.

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Excerpt: ?HOLE!? said Mr. Polly, and then for a change, and with greatly increased emphasis: ??Ole!? He paused, and then broke out with one of his private and peculiar idioms. ?Oh! Beastly Silly Wheeze of a Hole!?...

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Excerpt: Poems, in Two Volumes, Volume Two by William Wordsworth.

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Contents POEMS WRITTEN DURINGATOUR IN SCOTLAND. ........................................................................................................ 5 ROB ROY’s GRAVE ...................................................................................................................................................................... 5 2. THE SOLITARY REAPER ........................................................................................................................................................ 8 3. STEPPING WESTWARD .......................................................................................................................................................... 9 4. GLEN-ALMAIN, ..................................................................................................................................................................... 10 5. THE MATRON OF JEDBOROUGHAND HER HUSBAND ................................................................................................. 11 6. TO A HIGHLAND GIRL ..........................................................................................................

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. The experience of great officials who have laid down their dignities before death, or have had the philosophic mind to review themselves while still wielding the deputy sceptre, teaches them that in the exercise of authority over men an eccentric behaviour in trifles has most exposed them to hostile criticism and gone farthest to jeopardize their popularity. It is their Achilles? heel; the place where their mother Nature holds them as she dips them in our waters....

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Excerpt: This publication of William Blake?s Songs of Innocence.

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Table of Contents 5 ?Introduction 6 ?The Shepherd 7 ?Infant Joy 7 ?On Another?s Sorrow 8 ?The School Boy 10 ?Holy Thursday 11 ?Nurse?s Song 11 ?Laughing Song 12 ?The Little Black Boy 13 ?The Voice of the Ancient Bard 13 ?Ecchoing Green 15 ?The Chimney Sweeper 16 ?The Divine Image...

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Excerpt: At Paris there are almost always two separate parties going on at every ball and rout. First, an official party, composed of the persons invited, a fashionable and much-bored circle. Each one grimaces for his neighbor?s eye; most of the younger women are there for one person only; when each woman has assured herself that for that one she is the handsomest woman in the room, and that the opinion is perhaps shared by a few others, a few insignificant phrases are exchanged, as: ?Do you think of going away soon to La Crampade?? ?How well Madame de Portenduere sang!? ?Who is that little woman with such a load of diamonds?? Or, after firing off some smart epigrams, which give transient pleasure, and leave wounds that rankle long, the groups thin out, the mere lookers on go away, and the waxlights burn down to the sconces....

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Excerpt: Typhoon by Joseph Conrad.

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Excerpt: Persuasion by Jane Austen.

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Excerpt: WATCHMAN. I pray the gods to quit me of my toils, To close the watch I keep, this livelong year; For as a watch-dog lying, not at rest, Propped on one arm, upon the palace-roof Of Atreus? race, too long, too well I know The starry conclave of the midnight sky, Too well, the splendours of the firmament, The lords of light, whose kingly aspect shows-- What time they set or climb the sky in turn-- The year?s divisions, bringing frost or fire....

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. Night is generally my time for walking. In the summer I often leave home early in the morning, and roam about fields and lanes all day, or even escape for days or weeks together; but, saving in the country, I seldom go out until after dark, though, Heaven be thanked, I love its light and feel the cheerfulness it sheds upon the earth, as much as any creature living....

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Excerpt: Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.

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Excerpt: Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen.

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Excerpt: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only....

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Introduction: The Dolliver Romance. In ?The Dolliver Romance,? only three chapters of which the author lived to complete, we get an intimation as to what would have been the ultimate form given to that romance founded on the Elixir of Life, for which ?Septimius Felton? was the preliminary study. Having abandoned this study, and apparently forsaken the whole scheme in 1862, Hawthorne was moved to renew his meditation upon it in the following year; and as the plan of the romance had now seemingly developed to his satisfaction, he listened to the publisher?s proposal that it should begin its course as a serial story in the ?Atlantic Monthly? for January, 1864--the first instance in which he had attempted such a mode of publication....

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Contents INTRODUCTORY NOTE ................................................................................................................ 4 A SCENE FROM THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE ......................................................................... 7 ANOTHER SCENE FROM THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE...................................................... 21 ANOTHER FRAGMENT OF THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE................................................... 30...

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Excerpt: At a dimly remote period in the history of Brabant, communication between the Island of Cadzand and the Flemish coast was kept up by a boat which carried passengers from one shore to the other. Middelburg, the chief town in the island, destined to become so famous in the annals of Protestantism, at that time only numbered some two or three hundred hearths; and the prosperous town of Ostend was an obscure haven, a straggling village where pirates dwelt in security among the fishermen and the few poor merchants who lived in the place....

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Excerpt: Night and Day by Virginia Woolf.

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Excerpt: About thirty years ago Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet?s lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income. All Huntingdon exclaimed on the greatness of the match, and her uncle, the lawyer, himself, allowed her to be at least three thousand pounds short of any equitable claim to it....

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Excerpt: Swan Song by Anton Checkov, translated by Marian Fell.

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Contents INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................4 Chronological List of the Principal Works of Anton Tchekoff..................10 The Swan Song .............................................................................................. 11...