A Hero and Some Other Folks

_To think some one will care to listen to us, and to believe we do not speak to vacant air but to listening hearts, is always sweet. That friends have listened to this author's...

The setting of this character is entirely modern. "Les Miserables" is a story of the city and of poverty, and can not be dissociated from them by any wrench of thought, however...

Then, too, Jean Valjean is misjudged, and by those who should have trusted him as they trusted God. We find it hard to be patient with Marius, and are not patient with Cossette....

Some people are born to this profound insight as storm-petrels for the seas, needing not to be tutored, and are as men and women to whom we tell our secrets, scarce knowing why...

Your great poet is eminently sane. Not that this is the conception current concerning him--the reverse being the common idea--that a poet is a being afflicted with some strange...

Few illustrious characters are so little known as William the Silent. His face has faded from the sky of history as glory from a sunset cloud; though, on attention, reasons why...

Under sovereignty such as this was William the Silent citizen. William, Prince of Orange, was born in Nassau, April 23, 1533, and was assassinated at the convent of St. Agatha,...

Philip never swerved from his purpose; but though his Armadas were wrecked and his treasure galleons seized, in his cabinet he set himself to rigorous purpose, demanding impossi...

A statesman is a man of his own and succeeding ages, and in him, therefore, is much anticipatory. He outruns his time. The vision William the Silent had, which outran the simple...

The Spanish invasion of America, now, as we recall its story, big with pathos and remorse, the pathos predominating, now that the last rag of a province has been torn from their...

Passing along the line, find Holliday, so named from the projector of a part of this railroad line; on is De Soto, always thrillingly historic; farther is Eudora (a word of Gree...

This iconoclasm has nowhere more fully displayed itself than in its attitude toward the Bible. That book comes properly under the head of literature, for the reason that the gen...

The sea helps the soul's lack by supplying words and music. Tennyson never was at his best in a National Ode, unless one speaks from the elocutionary standpoint, because such ta...

And may not this prevalence of love in his poetry account for Tennyson's lack of humor? In his conversation, as his son tells us, he was even jocular, loving both to hear and to...

Another thing worthy a glad emphasis is, that America is her own historian. The New World has begotten the writers of its own story. How fully this is true will not be appreciat...

How ideas affect life when once they have become participants therein is the bar at which all ideas must stand for judgment. Carbonic-acid gas enters the lungs, fills them, and...

and feel assured from such a word that he who spoke, had he been where the battle raged, had left his stroke on many a shield; for his words have the crash of a Crusader's ax. W...

And the artist lover, under the first picture, in quaint letters, such as monks in remote ages used, wrote this legend, "To-morrow;" and the woman, taking the pencil, wrote in h...

But attempts thicken. In our century they group together like violets on a stream's bank fronting the sun in spring. Literary artists, knowing how difficulties hedge this attemp...

What are the sublimest poems of universal literature? Let this stand as a tentative reply: Aeschylus's "Prometheus Bound," Dante's "Divine Comedy," Shakespeare's "Hamlet," Milto...

Prince Job, smitten from his throne of prosperity and influence into a pit of ignominy, in his abasement cries, "Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, are mighty in pow...

What a revelation in character that is! If for a time God had, as object-lesson to the Jew and through him to the world, granted visible rewards and visible punishments, that wa...