On Something

Music, they say, does something to the soul, filling it full of unsatisfied but transcendent desires, and making it guess, in glimpses that mix and fail, the soul's ultimate rew...

All that by which we painfully may earn rectitude and a proper balance in the conduct of our short affairs I must believe that you will practise; and I must believe, as I look h...

The multiplicity of good work also and the way in which accident helps it is a cause. There are bits of architecture (and architecture is the most anonymous of all the arts) whi...

At a little desk in the gangway by which the chairs were approached sat a dark, pale child--I can call him by no other name, so frail and young did he seem--and the delicacy of...

"'You look tired,' he said to me in a kind voice that I liked very much and remembered clearly. 'I am,' said I, 'dog tired.' 'Come in with us,' he said, 'and we will give you so...

Before George left the house next morning his father laid before him, with the pomp which so great an occasion demanded, certain rules of conduct which should guide not only his...

My guide-book would have directions for the pacifying of Arabs, a trick which I learnt from a past master, a little way east of Batna in the year 1905--I will also explain how o...

Two artificial causeways negotiated the valley. Each bears to this day (at Stretford and at Stretton) the proof of its old character, for both words indicate the passage of a "s...

Through this range of hills at the back of the French Army lay a gap, just as there is a gap through the hills behind Leatherhead. Not only was that gap easily passable by an ar...

Nothing was further from my thoughts. I had imagined you knew me well enough--and, for the matter of that, all your mother's family--to judge me better. Believe me, no conceptio...

All things have been degraded in our time and have also been multiplied, which is perhaps a condition of degradation; and your simple thing, your bridge, has suffered with the r...

There is no one, or hardly any one, so wicked or so stupid as to deny the democratic ideal. There is no one, or hardly any one, so perverted that, were he the member of a small...

Of the various sketches in this book some appear for the first time, others are reprinted by courtesy of the Proprietors and Editors of _The Westminster Gazette_, _The Clarion_,...

A woman smiling at a little child, not knowing that others see her, and holding out her hands towards it, and in one of her hands flowers; an old man, lean and active, with an e...