Modern Essays

IT had been my habit, I am now aware, to speak somewhat lightly of the labors of anthologists: to insinuate that they led lives of bland sedentary ease. I shall not do so again....

Of dignified and self-respecting provincialism, such as Professor Royce so eloquently advocates, there might well be more in American books. Our poets desert the domestic landsc...

For she used the car as a jitney bus. It was her social life. She never had a "party" in all her nearly seventeen years--wouldn't have one; but she never drove a block in the ca...

BUT ... overstrain yourself _now and then_. For this reason: The things you create easily and joyously will not continue to come easily and joyously unless you yourself are gett...

But this morning, in these old Chambers in an ancient Inn buried in the heart of London City, I have agreed to get up and go out. The reason for this momentous departure from a...

"And that ain't all," he continued, after a pause broken only by an occasional snore from our blissful neighbors. "Look at the way she cooked them pomme de terres and fixed thin...

There, you see (Fig. 6)? The one on the right is a Bolshevik; he has a low forehead and beetling brows--a most unpleasant man. Yet he has a powerful face. The one on the left wa...

When I came to my own gate and my own field, and had before me the house I knew, I looked around a little (though it was already evening), and I saw that the grass was standing...

You have all become brothers in a great society, not apprentices, since that implies a master, and nothing should be further from the attitude of the teacher than much that is m...

But I think of all the settings that we used, the lighthouse plays were the best. There is something about a lighthouse that you don't get in a modern drawing room. What it is,...

Katarina had settled, I forget how, on the sofa, and was reclining very comfortably with her head on my shoulder and both arms about me. We did not talk. No questions passed as...

Every man illustrious in his day, however much he may be gratified by his fame, looks with an eager eye to posterity for a continuance of past favors, and would even live the re...

It was on the whole characteristic of Victorian free-thinkers to attack Christianity with reverence and discrimination in an attempt to preserve its substance while removing obs...

But best of all books for midnight are travel books. Once I was lost every night for months with Doughty in the "Arabia Deserta." He is a craggy author. A long course of the ord...

The night wind from the river, or from the open spaces of the wilds, chills you after a time. You begin to think of your blankets. In a few moments you roll yourself in their so...

There is no beverage which I have liked "to live with" more than Beer; but I have never had a cellar large enough to accommodate much of it, or an establishment numerous enough...

But passive renunciation is not the whole wisdom; for not by renunciation alone can we build a temple for the worship of our own ideals. Haunting foreshadowings of the temple ap...

The Rooskis came over the crest-line in a huddle of massed battalions, and Gazeka was after them like a rat after a terrier. I knew that his horse-guns had no horses (a rule of...

I want my life, the only life of which I am assured, to have symmetry or, in default of that, at least to acquire some clarity. Surely it is not asking very much to wish that my...

As general editorial roustabout, to find each week a "leader," a translation, say, from _In Allgemeine Fishcherei-Zeitung_, or _Economic Circular No. 10_, "Mussels in the Tribut...

Gradually his task was made more difficult. Paper gave way to papier-mâché and finally to wood, but even the toughest of these dummy dragons had no terrors for Gawaine. One swee...