Classic Books

There are all sorts of mills: some go by water, undershot or overshot; but if the millpond is dry, or the stream runs low, they come to a standstill. They want help, they must have water, to go on. Next there are steam-mills, which make a great noise and do a great deal of work; but they want coals and water too: if both are not brought to them, they stop and can do nothing. And then there are wind-mills; but everybody knows that wind-mills, though they do stand on the tops of hills, in spite of their great long arms stuck out, are of no use if the wind does not blow. So a man may try to do a great deal of work; but if he tries to get on without the help of his neighbours, and without being willing to help them in return, he will soon find that he too has to come to a standstill. Yes, young or old, rich or poor, must all help each other. Once there came on earth a great Person, great though poor, a carpenter’s son.

The 4th publication in the Allan Quatermain series. In this thrilling tale of danger and adventure, young Harry joins his father, the famous Alan Quatermain, on a hunt for lions deep in Africa.

I have been reprehended by some of the public critics for the notices which I have annexed to my daughter’s works. As I do not know their reasons for this reprehension, I cannot submit even to their respectable authority. I trust, however, the British public will sympathize with what a father feels for a daughter’s literary success, particularly as this father and daughter have written various works in partnership.
—from this book

We should not give very much for the chances of a poor friendless lad of feeble constitution, vagrant disposition, and an overpowering taste for excitement, who should be turned adrift to shift for himself at an age when most young lads are still safe at school. The fortunes of such a one, if adequately recorded, might, and no doubt would, be infinitely more engrossing, if less edifying, than the humdrum chronicle of the steady clerk or patient mechanic; but a prison, or workhouse infirmary, might safely be predicted as the ultimate and inevitable receptacle of such a piece of human flotsam.

But now let us suppose—a handy supposition, I admit—that our imaginary little nomad were endowed with that illuminating spark we call genius; let us suppose, too, that in late boyhood, or early manhood, he learnt to love letters, and deliberately set about describing his extraordinary experiences, as well as the strange bedfellows whom misery from time to time threw in his way—what piquant, what grotesque pen-and-ink sketches we might expect from such an inspired ragamuffin! It would be Oliver Twist or Humphrey Clinker telling his own tale without the softening intervention of Mr. Charles Dickens or Mr. Tobias Smollett.

The following Tales are meant to be submitted to the young reader as an introduction to the study of Shakespeare, for which purpose his words are used whenever it seemed possible to bring them in; and in whatever has been added to give them the regular form of a connected story, diligent care has been taken to select such words as might least interrupt the effect of the beautiful English tongue in which he wrote: therefore, words introduced into our language since his time have been as far as possible avoided.

This volume consists English translations of various remarkable Sanskrit plays such as Sakuntala, Vikramorvasi, Malavikagnimitra, Yayaticharitra, etc.

Ashipattle had one sister, and she was very good and kind to him. In return for her kindness he told her long stories of trolls and giants and heroes and brave deeds, and as long as he would tell she would sit and listen. But his brothers could not stand his stories, and used to throw clods at him to make him be quiet. They were angry because Ashipattle was always the hero of his own stories, and in his tales there was nothing he dared not do.

An anthology of ten short stories of speculation that questions the existance of ghosts while wittily narrating the adventures or tales where men and ghosts co-exists. Edith Wharton’s ‘Tales of Men and Ghosts’ was first published in the year 1910.

At not more than a stone’s throw from a neat market town, in a certain shire of England, lived Francis Hartland, Esq. in a well-built square house, which was separated from the King’s high road, by a lawn of twenty acres. Round this lawn a double row of handsome elms lined a ring fence, and formed the outer boundary, in that part next the house, of a bank covered with all sorts of shrubs, which sloped in a gradually inclined plane, from the shining laurel to the dwarf cistus, and meta broad belt of gravel, hard and smooth as marble, through which no upstart weed ever dared to force its way.

The idea that the extraordinary narrative which has been called the Joyce-Armstrong Fragment is an elaborate practical joke evolved by some unknown person, cursed by a perverted and sinister sense of humour, has now been abandoned by all who have examined the matter. The most macabre and imaginative of plotters would hesitate before linking his morbid fancies with the unquestioned and tragic facts which reinforce the statement. Though the assertions contained in it are amazing and even monstrous, it is none the less forcing itself upon the general intelligence that they are true, and that we must readjust our ideas to the new situation. This world of ours appears to be separated by a slight and precarious margin of safety from a most singular and unexpected danger.

A famous series by the celebrated English novelist Arnold Bennett. ‘Tales of the Five Towns’ is a series of short stories set in the posh Staffordshire Potteries towns. There lived a rich cast of businessmen, shopkeepers, mill and pottery owners and fading gentility. A must read for anybody curious about the author’s everlasting fame.

First published in the year 1922, the present book ‘Tales of the Jazz Age’ is a collection of eleven short stories written by one of the most celebrated English novelist F Scott Fitzgerald. Divided into three separate parts, according to subject matter, it includes one of his better-known short stories, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”.

“I was afraid at times. The earth must have some feeling, don’t you think? When we had burrowed to a great depth, when we had made this wound in the mountain, she received us rudely enough. She breathed a hot breath on us that made the heart stop beating, made the head dizzy and the bones to ache. Many experienced this. Then the mother earth showered stones upon her children, poured hot water over us; ay, there was fear in it, signor! Sometimes, in the torchlight, the water became red and my father told me that we had wounded the earth and that she would drown us, would burn us all up with her blood—’you will live to see it!’ It was all fancy, like enough, but when one hears such words deep in the bowels of the earth—in the damp and suffocating darkness, amid the plaintive splashing of water and the grinding of iron against stone—one forgets for the moment how much is fantasy. For everything was fantastic there, dear signor: we men were so puny, while the mountain, into whose belly we were boring, reached up to the sky. One must see in order to understand it. It is necessary to see the black gaping mouth cut by us, tiny people, who entered it at sunset—and how sadly the sun looks after those who desert him and go into the bowels of the earth! It is necessary to see our machines and the grim face of the mountain, and to hear the dark rumblings in it and the blasts, like the wild laughter of a madman.”

Lord Dunsany was one of the most influential fantasy authors of the twentieth century. Like J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis he served during the great war. Collected here are twenty-nine stories of that terrible war. Dunsany saw the horrors of war and he was uniquely qualified to capture the experience in prose.

I do not know where I may be when this preface is read. As I write it in August 1916, I am at Ebrington Barracks, Londonderry, recovering from a slight wound. But it does not greatly matter where I am; my dreams are here before you amongst the following pages; and writing in a day when life is cheap, dreams seem to me all the dearer, the only things that survive.

Just now the civilization of Europe seems almost to have ceased, and nothing seems to grow in her torn fields but death, yet this is only for a while and dreams will come back again and bloom as of old, all the more radiantly for this terrible ploughing, as the flowers will bloom again where the trenches are and the primroses shelter in shell-holes for many seasons, when weeping Liberty has come home to Flanders.

In 1892 I was asked by the Harvard Corporation to give a few public lectures on psychology to the Cambridge teachers. The talks now printed form the substance of that course, which has since then been delivered at various places to various teacher-audiences. I have found by experience that what my hearers seem least to relish is analytical technicality, and what they most care for is concrete practical application. So I have gradually weeded out the former, and left the latter unreduced; and now, that I have at last written out the lectures, they contain a minimum of what is deemed ‘scientific’ in psychology, and are practical and popular in the extreme.

The world was a puddle of gloom and of shadowy things,
He sped till the red and the gold of invisible day
Was burnish and flames to the undermost spread of his wings,
So he outlighted the stars as he poised in the grey.
Nearer was he to the knowledge and splendour of God,
Mysteries sealed from the ken of the ancient and wise—
Beauties forbidden to those who are one with the clod—
All that there was of the Truth was revealed to his eyes.

First published in the year 1587, ‘Tamburlaine the Great — Part 1’ is a play written by one of the critically most acclaimed and appreciated playwrights of the sixteenth century, who was also a contemporary of the celebrated William Shakespeare. This play is a milestone in Elizabethan public drama; it marks a turning away from the clumsy language and loose plotting of the earlier Tudor dramatists, and a new interest in fresh and vivid language, memorable action, and intellectual complexity.

First published in the year 1853, the present children’s book of fiction ‘Tanglewood Tales’ by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne is a re-writing of well-known Greek myths. This book is a sequel to Hawthorne’s ‘A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys’.

Russian literature, so full of enigmas, contains no greater creative mystery than Nikolai Vasil’evich Gogol (1809-1852), who has done for the Russian novel and Russian prose what Pushkin has done for Russian poetry. Before these two men came Russian literature can hardly have been said to exist. It was pompous and effete with pseudo-classicism; foreign influences were strong; in the speech of the upper circles there was an over-fondness for German, French, and English words. Between them the two friends, by force of their great genius, cleared away the debris which made for sterility and erected in their stead a new structure out of living Russian words. The spoken word, born of the people, gave soul and wing to literature; only by coming to earth, the native earth, was it enabled to soar. Coming up from Little Russia, the Ukraine, with Cossack blood in his veins, Gogol injected his own healthy virus into an effete body, blew his own virile spirit, the spirit of his race, into its nostrils, and gave the Russian novel its direction to this very day.

Tartuffe, or The Impostor, or The Hypocrite, first performed in 1664, is one of the most famous theatrical comedies by Molière. The characters of Tartuffe, Elmire, and Orgon are considered among the greatest classical theatre roles.

Tarzan and the Foreign Legion is a novel by American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, the twenty-second in his series of twenty-four books about the title character Tarzan.

SABOR, the lioness, suckled her young—a single fuzzy ball, spotted like Sheeta, the leopard. She lay in the warm sunshine before the rocky cavern that was her lair, stretched out upon her side with half closed eyes, yet Sabor was alert. There had been three of these little, fuzzy balls at first—two daughters and a son—and Sabor and Numa, their sire, had been proud of them; proud and happy. But kills had not been plentiful, and Sabor, undernourished, had been unable to produce sufficient milk to nourish properly three lusty cubs, and then a cold rain had come, and the little ones had sickened. Only the strongest survived—the two daughters had died. Sabor had mourned, pacing to and fro beside the pitiful bits of bedraggled fur, whining and moaning. Now and again she would nose them with her muzzle as though she would awaken them from the long sleep that knows no waking. At last, however, she abandoned her efforts, and now her whole savage heart was filled with concern for the little male cub that remained to her. That was why Sabor was more alert than usual.

Lieutenant Albert Werper had only the prestige of the name he had dishonored to thank for his narrow escape from being cashiered.

The fantastic series of tales about Tarzan, who was adopted by a female ape after the death of his parents and reared by her in an ignorance of his human features, ‘Tarzan of the Apes’ is a classic fantasy series from early 20th century.

Tarzan the Magnificent is a book by American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, the twenty-first in his series of twenty-four books about the title character Tarzan.

Silent as the shadows through which he moved, the great beast slunk through the midnight jungle, his yellow-green eyes round and staring, his sinewy tail undulating behind him, his head lowered and flattened, and every muscle vibrant to the thrill of the hunt.

“They are very pretty, some of them,” said the Woman of the World; “not the sort of letters I should have written myself.”
“I should like to see a love-letter of yours,” interrupted the Minor Poet.
“It is very kind of you to say so,” replied the Woman of the World. “It never occurred to me that you would care for one.”
“It is what I have always maintained,” retorted the Minor Poet; “you have never really understood me.” -An excerpt

Affirmation is the core of prayer practice as taught by Jesus. In this understanding of prayer, Jesus raised us from being mere beggers, asking for things of the physical world from a God “out there.”