Humanly Speaking

"It was the same voice I seemed to hear when I received the letter of your secretary asking me to address this grange. As I left the smoke of the city behind me and looked up at...

You followed the same line of argumentation. You showed that there was nothing imaginative about your work. You could give a warranty deed for every fact which you put on the ma...

"It economizes space to have the vegetable market and the martyrdom of Giordano Bruno and the assassination of Julius Cæsar all close together. But they are too close. The imagi...

I have in mind a clergyman who, in his own home, is progressive to a fault. He is impatient of any delay. He is all the time seeking out the very latest inventions in social and...

Who were the worshipers? Druids or pre-Druids? The archæologists tell us that they belonged to the Early Bronze period. Now Early Bronze is a good enough term for articles in a...

When one comes to feel the stirring of primal sympathies for the manifold life of the city, as he does for the manifold life of the woods, Rome ceases to be distracting. The old...

The trouble is that the literary man finds that this does not afford exciting material for a best seller. So he must invent hazards to make the game interesting to the spectator...

HUMANLY SPEAKING. AMONG FRIENDS. BY THE CHRISTMAS FIRE. THE PARDONER'S WALLET. THE ENDLESS LIFE. THE GENTLE READER. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES: THE AUTOCRAT AND HIS FELLOW BOARDERS....

John Bunyan goes to jail rather than attend the parish church, George Fox goes to jail rather than take off his hat in the presence of the magistrate. Why should he do so when t...

The struggle is stem and unrelenting. It taxes all our energies. And yet it is exhilarating. There is a moral quick-wittedness which sees the smile behind the threatening mask o...

What has been treated by incompetent critics as mere boastfulness has in reality been practical sagacity and foresight. Sam Slick was only expressing a truth when he said, "The...