Classic Books

Of Time and the River’ is a 1935 novel by American author Thomas Wolfe. It is a fictionalized autobiography, using the name Eugene Gant for Wolfe’s, detailing the protagonist’s early and mid-twenties. It was at this time that the character attends Harvard University, moves to New York City and teaches English at a university there. He travels overseas with the character Francis Starwick. Francis Starwick was based on Wolfe’s friend, playwright Kenneth Raisbeck.

Off on a Comet is an 1877 science fiction novel by Jules Verne.

Now,’ said the doctor, ‘my part is done, and, I may say, with some vanity, well done. It remains only to get you out of this cold and poisonous city, and to give you two months of a pure air and an easy conscience. The last is your affair. To the first I think I can help you. It fells indeed rather oddly; it was but the other day the Padre came in from the country; and as he and I are old friends, although of contrary professions, he applied to me in a matter of distress among some of his parishioners. This was a family–but you are ignorant of Spain, and even the names of our grandees are hardly known to you; suffice it, then, that they were once great people, and are now fallen to the brink of destitution. Nothing now belongs to them but the residencia, and certain leagues of desert mountain, in the greater part of which not even a goat could support life. But the house is a fine old place, and stands at a great height among the hills, and most salubriously; and I had no sooner heard my friend’s tale, than I remembered you. I told him I had a wounded officer, wounded in the good cause, who was now able to make a change; and I proposed that his friends should take you for a lodger. Instantly the Padre’s face grew dark, as I had maliciously foreseen it would. It was out of the question, he said. Then let them starve, said I, for I have no sympathy with tatterdemalion pride. There-upon we separated, not very content with one another; but yesterday, to my wonder, the Padre returned and made a submission: the difficulty, he said, he had found upon enquiry to be less than he had feared; or, in other words, these proud people had put their pride in their pocket. I closed with the offer; and, subject to your approval, I have taken rooms for you in the residencia. The air of these mountains will renew your blood; and the quiet in which you will there live is worth all the medicines in the world.’

First published in the year 1919, Irish writer and editor Robert Lynd’s ‘Old and New Masters’ is a collection of biographical sketches of legendary authors as tall as Jane Austen, Wordsworth, Dostoevsky etc by the author. This collection is quite informative and gives a lot of inside stories about the noted English writers.

Washington Irving was an American author of the early nineteenth century. Best known for his short stories The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip van Winkle, he was also a prolific essayist, biographer and historian. He spoke fluent Spanish, which served him well in his writings on that country, and he could read several other languages, including German and Dutch. His first book was A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker. He travelled on the Western frontier in the 1830s and recorded his glimpses of Western tribes in A Tour on the Prairies.

English author Warwick Deeping’s 1928 novel ‘Old Pybus’ centers around a London bookshop proprietor and his relationship with his sons. He is estranged from them as they refused to enlist in World War I. Many years later, now a hotelier, he meets a young book-lover who stops into his inn. Unknow to him, it is his grandson.

The material for this book was gathered partly for lectures on the history of medicine at Fordham University School of Medicine, and partly for articles on a number of subjects in the Catholic Encyclopedia. Some of it was developed for a series of addresses at commencements of medical schools and before medical societies, on the general topic how old the new is in surgery, medicine, dentistry, and pharmacy. The information thus presented aroused so much interest, the accomplishments of the physicians and surgeons of a period that is usually thought quite sterile in medical science proved, indeed, so astonishing, that I was tempted to connect the details for a volume in the Fordham University Press series. There is no pretence to any original investigation in the history of medicine, nor to any extended consultation of original documents. I have had most of the great books that are mentioned in the course of this volume in my hands, and have given as much time to the study of them as could be afforded in the midst of a rather busy life, but I owe my information mainly to the distinguished German and French scholars who have in recent years made deep and serious studies of these Old Makers of Medicine, and I have made my acknowledgments to them in the text as opportunity presented itself.

Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter.

Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas is the second book by American writer Herman Melville, first published in London in 1847, and a sequel to his first South Sea narrative Typee, also based on the author’s experiences in the South Pacific.

It is not the biologist with an inkling of mathematics, but the skilled and learned mathematician who must ultimately deal with such problems as are merely sketched and adumbrated here. I pretend to no math­e­mat­i­cal skill, but I have made what use I could of what tools I had; I have dealt with simple cases, and the math­e­mat­i­cal methods which I have introduced are of the easiest and simplest kind. Elementary as they are, my book has not been written without the help—the indispensable help—of many friends. Like Mr Pope translating Homer, when I felt myself deficient I sought assistance! And the experience which Johnson attributed to Pope has been mine also, that men of learning did not refuse to help me.

TRUTHS of the physical order may possess much external significance, but internal significance they have none. The latter is the privilege of intellectual and moral truths, which are concerned with the objectivation of the will in its highest stages, whereas physical truths are concerned with it in its lowest.

The publishers tell me that the first large edition of “On Sunset Highways” has been exhausted and that the steady demand for the book warrants a reprint. I have, therefore, improved the occasion to revise the text in many places and to add descriptive sketches of several worth-while tours we subsequently made. As it stands now I think the book covers most of the ground of especial interest to the average motorist in California.

One can not get the best idea of this wonderful country from the railway train or even from the splendid electric system that covers most of the country surrounding Los Angeles. The motor that takes one into the deep recesses of hill and valley to infrequented nooks along the seashore and, above all, to the slopes and summits of the mountains, is surely the nearest approach to the ideal.

I heartily accept the motto,—“That government is best which governs least;” and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe—“That government is best which governs not at all;” and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government. The standing army is only an arm of the standing government. The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it. Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for, in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure.

This exquisite novel, first published in 1859, like so many great works of art, holds depths of meaning which at first sight lie veiled under the simplicity and harmony of the technique. To the English reader On the Eve is a charmingly drawn picture of a quiet Russian household, with a delicate analysis of a young girl’s soul; but to Russians it is also a deep and penetrating diagnosis of the destinies of the Russia of the fifties.
Elena, the Russian girl, is the central figure of the novel. In comparing her with Turgenev’s other women, the reader will remark that he is allowed to come into closer spiritual contact with her than even with Lisa. The successful portraits of women drawn by men in fiction are generally figures for the imagination to play on; however much that is told to one about them, the secret springs of their character are left a little obscure, but when Elena stands before us we know all the innermost secrets of her character.

Instead of memorizing vocabulary words, work your way through an actual well-written novel. Even novices can follow along as each individual English paragraph is paired with the corresponding Russian paragraph.

Originally written around 49 AD for his father-in-law Paulinus, Seneca here brings up many Stoic principles on the nature of time, namely that people waste much of it in meaningless pursuits. According to Seneca, nature gives people enough time to do what is really important and it is up to the individual to allot it properly.

The present publication presents one or two points of interest. In the first place, the Lectures were especially intended for young persons, and are therefore as free as possible from technicalities; and in the second place, they are printed as they were spoken, verbatim et literatim. A careful and skilful reporter took them down; and the manuscript, as deciphered from his notes, was subsequently most carefully corrected by the Editor as regards any scientific points which were not clear to the short-hand writer; hence all that is different arises solely from the impossibility, alas! of conveying the manner as well as the matter of the Lecturer. -Preface

“Parallax,” the Founder of the Zetetic Philosophy, is dead; and it now becomes the duty of those, especially, who knew him personally and who labored with him in the cause of Truth against Error, to begin, anew, the work which is left in their hands. Dr. Samuel B. Rowbotham finished his earthly labours, in England, the country of his birth, December 23, 1884, at the age of 89. He was, certainly, one of the most gifted of men: and though his labours as a public lecturer were confined within the limits of the British Islands his published work is known all over the world and is destined to live and be republished when books on the now popular system of philosophy will be considered in no other light than as bundles of waste paper.

Claude rose and dressed,—a simple operation which took very little time. He crept down two flights of stairs, feeling his way in the dusk, his red hair standing up in peaks, like a cock’s comb. He went through the kitchen into the adjoining washroom, which held two porcelain stands with running water. Everybody had washed before going to bed, apparently, and the bowls were ringed with a dark sediment which the hard, alkaline water had not dissolved. Shutting the door on this disorder, he turned back to the kitchen, took Mahailey’s tin basin, doused his face and head in cold water, and began to plaster down his wet hair.

When Boniface went forth from England to evangelise Germany, he was received with welcome, and regarded as a saint: when Gerhardt came from Germany to restore the pure Gospel to England, he was cast out of the vineyard and slain.
The spirit of her who is drunk with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus is the same now that it was then. She does not ask if a man agree with the Word of God, but whether he agree with her. “When the Church has spoken” – this has been said by exalted ecclesiastical lips quite recently – “we cannot appeal to Scripture against her!”

An old-fashioned carrier’s cart, such as you may still meet on the roads of Sussex, tilted, one-horsed, and moving at the leisurely pace of a bye-gone age, turned East at the Turnpike, and made slowly along the Lewes-Beachbourne road under the northern scarp of the Downs one evening of autumn in 1908. In it, at the back of the driver, were a young man and a young woman, the only passengers, ensconced among hen-coops, flitches of bacon, and baskets of greens.

It was the morning after that Sunday when Matilda had been baptized. The girls came down to prepare breakfast as usual; Maria in a very unsettled humour. She was cloudy and captious to a degree that Matilda could not understand. The kitchen was hot; the butter was soft; the milk was turned; the bread was dry. All things went wrong.

“It is no wonder the bread is dry,” said Matilda; “it has been baked ever since last Friday.”

“Thursday. I didn’t say it was a wonder. Aunt Candy will have the bread dry. I hate it!”

“And it is no wonder the butter is soft, if you keep it up here in the kitchen. The kitchen must be hot, with this hot stove. But the milkman will be along directly.”

First published in the year 1704, Sir Isaac Newton’s book ‘Opticks’ analyzes the fundamental nature of light by means of the refraction of light with prisms and lenses, the diffraction of light by closely spaced sheets of glass, and the behaviour of color mixtures with spectral lights or pigment powders.

Orlando: A Biography is a novel by Virginia Woolf, first published on 11 October 1928. A high-spirited romp inspired by the tumultuous family history of the aristocratic poet and novelist Vita .

Unto the realm of Pluto many roads
Lead with dark winding from the bright abodes
Of men, and when life’s last detaining thread
Is cut by Iris, and the body, dead,
With Charon’s coin in palm, rests in the tomb
Or on the pyre, the dæmon of its doom
After much pitiful forbearance tears
The soul from its environment of cares
With promise sweet of love’s awaiting kiss,
Of old friends greeting, and much holy bliss
On shores Elysian, where all ways are peace,
And all existence virtue without cease;
But ere the fields of Asphodel are won
Dire labours manifold must first be done
By soul and dæmon.
From the Book

“”Who is he, anyhow? Where does he hail from, and what is he doing here?”
“The speaker leaned over the little bar in the hotel at Maritzburg, and looked first at the landlord who stood behind it and then at half a dozen roughly dressed companions who were congregated in front of it.
“These men were cattle-dealers and speculators. They made it a business to furnish oxen, wagons, supplies, and servants to hunters and travellers who were bound up the country.” -an excerpt