Dreamthorp

DREAMTHORP ON THE WRITING OF ESSAYS OF DEATH AND THE FEAR OF DYING WILLIAM DUNBAR A LARK'S FLIGHT CHRISTMAS MEN OF LETTERS ON THE IMPORTANCE OF A MAN TO HIMSELF A SHELF IN MY BO...

I do not think that Mr. Buckle could have written his "History of Civilization" in Dreamthorp, because in it books, conversation, and the other appurtenances of intellectual lif...

The essayist does not usually appear early in the literary history of a country: he comes naturally after the poet and the chronicler. His habit of mind is leisurely; he does no...

"When death waits for us is uncertain, let us everywhere look for him. The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; who has learnt to die, has forgot to serve. Th...

And you see at once how a man's notions of death and dying are deepened by a wider experience. Middle age may fear death quite as little as youth fears it; but it has learned se...

Knowing but little of Dunbar's life, our interest is naturally concentrated on what of his writings remain to us. And to modern eyes the old poet is a singular spectacle. His la...

It is taken for granted that the spectators of public executions--the artisans and country people who take up their stations overnight as close to the barriers as possible, and...

A good story is told of an Irish gentleman--still known in London society--who inherited the family estates and the family banshee. The estates he lost--no uncommon circumstance...

"Some say that ever 'gainst the season comes Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated The bird of dawning singeth all night long; And then they say no spirit dares stir abroad;...

Of human notabilities men of letters are the most interesting, and this arises mainly from their outspokenness as a class. The writer makes himself known in a way that no other...

Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of mortal life. The majority of men slip into their graves without having encountered on their way thither any signal catastrophe or...

We never get quit of ourselves. While I am writing, the spring is outside, and this season of the year touches my spirit always with a sense of newness, of strangeness, of resur...

When a man glances critically through the circle of his intimate friends, he is obliged to confess that they are far from being perfect. They possess neither the beauty of Apoll...

The eighteenth century must ever remain the most brilliant and interesting period of English literary history. It is interesting not only on account of its splendour, but becaus...

Of his life we do not know much. In his youth he studied law and disliked it,--a circumstance common enough in the lives of men of letters, from his time to that of Shirley Broo...

"There was once, as old stories tell, a certain Duke Theseus, lord and governor of Athens. The same was a great warrior and conqueror of realms. He defeated the Amazons, and wed...

The house I dwell in stands apart from the little town, and relates itself to the houses as I do to the inhabitants. It sees everything, but is itself unseen, or, at all events,...

The doctor was anxious that, during the following winter, a short course of lectures should be delivered in the village schoolroom, and in my garden he held several conferences...

What think you of a world after that pattern? "As You Like it" is a vagabond play, and, verily, if there waved in any wind that blows a forest peopled like Arden's, with an exil...