My Literary Passions

Probably no dramatist ever needed the stage less, and none ever brought more to it. There have been few joys for me in life comparable to that of seeing the curtain rise on "Ham...

In my own case there followed my acquaintance with these authors certain Boeotian years, when if I did not go backward I scarcely went forward in the paths I had set out upon. T...

But for the moment it appeared to me a tremendous crisis, and I listened as the minister of justice read his communication, with a thrill which lost itself in the interest I sud...

After my friend went away I fell much to him for society, and we took long, rambling walks together, or sat on the stoop before his door, or lounged over the books in the drug-s...

I do not blame him for this; he was himself, and he could not have been any other manner of man without loss; but I say that the greatest talent is not that which breathes of th...

During the winter we passed at Columbus I suppose that my father read things aloud to us after his old habit, and that I listened with the rest. I have a dim notion of first kno...

A few months ago I was at the old home, and I read that book again, after not looking at it for more than thirty years; and I read it with amazement at its prevailing artistic v...

I do not the least condemn that sort of thing; one does not live by sweets, unless one is willing to spoil one's digestion; but one may now and then indulge one's self without h...

I. THE BOOKCASE AT HOME II. GOLDSMITH III. CERVANTES IV. IRVING V. FIRST FICTION AND DRAMA VI. LONGFELLOW'S "SPANISH STUDENT" VII. SCOTT VIII. LIGHTER FANCIES IX. POPE X. VARIOU...

I could not rest satisfied with "Maud"; I sent the same summer to Cleveland for the little volume which then held all the poet's work, and abandoned myself so wholly to it, that...

In spite of Heine and Tennyson, De Quincey had a large place in my affections, though this was perhaps because he was not a poet; for more than those two great poets there was t...

I cannot say at what times I read these books, but they must have been odd times, for life was very full of play then, and was already beginning to be troubled with work. As I h...

Long after I had thought never to read it--in fact when I was 'nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita'--I read Milton's "Paradise Lost," and found in it a majestic beauty that just...

Account of one's reading is an account of one's life Adam Bede Affections will not be bidden Air of looking down on the highest Alliance of the tragic and the comic Anthony Trol...