Category: Essays, Letters & Speeches

Leaves in the Wind

This collection of essays, now republished in the "Wayfarers' Library," were written during the war, and first appeared in book form during the war. Like the preceding volume, _Pebbles on the Shore_, they were the literary diversions of a time of great public anxiety and heavy...

Chapters

10. Part 10

And if you are really conspicuous you cannot trust yourself out of doors--unless you have the courage of John Burns, who does not care two pins who sees him or talks about him....

2. Part 2

And may I not in this connection recall the practice of Sir Andrew Clarke, the physician of Mr. Gladstone, as recorded in the reminiscences of Mr. Henry Holiday? At dinner one n...

3. Part 3

But most of all I love the back seat on such a night as last night, when the crescent moon is sailing high in a cloudless sky and making all the earth a wonder of romance. The g...

14. Part 14

You have only to turn to Lincoln or Cromwell to feel the vast gulf between their piety and this vulgar impiety. And the reason is simple. They believed in the spiritual governan...

6. Part 6

Meanwhile the Pekinese party were passing through every stage of resistance to abject surrender. "I'll go on the top," said the sealskin lady at last. "You mustn't." "I will." "...

11. Part 11

There are of course women who dress and comport themselves with an eye to male admiration as well as female envy and appreciation. They are the women of the bold eye, which is n...

5. Part 5

And for the same reason. The Fifth Symphony or any other great work of art creates a state of mind, a spiritual atmosphere, that is destroyed by any intrusive and alien note. An...

9. Part 9

I don't offer that conversation as representative. I imagine that in the lump women are thinking less about dress to-day from the merely ornamental point of view than they ever...

7. Part 7

Or perhaps the explanation is that offered by Fielding, the novelist. He belonged to a branch of the Earl of Denbigh's family, but the Denbighs spelt their family name Feilding....

8. Part 8

It is not merely that we avert our eyes from the facts. That is certainly done. You may go to see the "war pictures" at the cinema and come away without supposing that they repr...

4. Part 4

I was going down to the country the other night when I fell into conversation with a soldier who was going home on leave. He was a reservist, who, after leaving the Army, had ta...

12. Part 12

It is the same off the stage. The art of politics is the art of "taking the call." Harley knew the trick perfectly. Where anything was to be got, it was said of him, he always k...

15. Part 15

It is a chill, but a chastening thought. It leaves us with a sense of loneliness, but it brings with it, also, a sense of power, the power of the unconquerable human spirit, sel...

1. Part 1

This collection of essays, now republished in the "Wayfarers' Library," were written during the war, and first appeared in book form during the war. Like the preceding volume, _...

13. Part 13

The truth is expressed somewhere in Hardy's works, where he says that the soul's specific gravity is always less than that of the sea of circumstances into which it is cast, and...

16. Part 16

The sun climbs the heavens above the eastward hills, goes regally overhead, and slopes to his setting beyond the plain. You mark the shadows shorten and lengthen as they steal r...