The Silent Isle

There are two ways of recording and communicating to others an impression, say, of a building or a place. One way is to sit down at a definite point, and make an elaborate pictu...

All this is very delightful; and no less delightful, too, is it, if the mood takes me, to wander off for a whole day in the country; to moon onwards entirely oblivious of time;...

I have just finished a book and despatched it to the press. It is rather a dreary moment that! At first one has a sense of relief at having finished a task and set down a burden...

It is an interesting question how far it is allowable to dislike other people. Of course we are bound to love our enemies if we can, but even the Gospel sets us an example of un...

And even if the disasters of the body have been in a sense our own fault; if we have lived prodigally and carelessly, either yielding to base desires or recklessly overworking a...

I have been reading the Memoir of J.H. Shorthouse, and it has been a great mystery to me. It is an essentially commonplace kind of life that is there revealed. He was a well-to-...

I have been staying with a friend in Yorkshire, in an out-of-the-way place, and I have seen a good deal of the parish clergyman there, who is rather a pathetic person, I think....

The only critic who helps me is the critic whose humility keeps pace with his acuteness, who leads me gently where he has himself trodden patiently and observantly, and does not...

What I find to regret in these latter days is--I say it with shame--that there is no house of any living writer which I should visit with this sense of awe and desire and sacred...

But in spite of everything, how one enjoys it all; how interesting and absorbing it all is! Wherever one turns, there are delicious things to see, from the aconite with its yell...

I think that where one so often makes a mistake in life is in thinking of the beautiful past as over and done with. One ought to think of it rather as existing. It can no more b...

It would be very difficult to compose a formal biography of Shelley, because he was such a vague, imaginative, inconsistent creature. The documentary evidence is often wholly co...

But the larger question is this. What right have philosophers or theologians to arrogate to themselves the sole right of speculation in these matters? If religion is a vital mat...

I went to-day on a vague walk in the country, taking attractive by-ways and field-paths, and came in the course of the afternoon to a lonely village among wide pastures which I...

they are people of heroic temper, and cannot be called a common species. "Do the next thing," says the old motto. But what if the next thing is one of many, none of them very im...

But this very absence of recognition and fame was what made the lives of these two great poets so intensely beautiful; there is hardly a great poet who has achieved fame who has...

The difficulty is to know at what point to draw the line. These limited enthusiasms may have an educative effect upon the persons who indulge them, but they may also have a stun...

There has been staying with me for the last few days a perfectly delightful person; an old man--he is nearly eighty--who is exactly what an old man ought to be, and what one wou...

People often talk as if human beings were crushed by sorrows and misfortunes and tragic events. It is not so! We are crushed by temperament. Just as Dr. Johnson said about writi...

It was the same with the treatment of literature; it all seemed reduced to a game played with counters. There was no simplicity of apprehension; the point seemed to be to apply...

What I rather anticipate is the growth among our writers of a poetical prose, with a severe structure and sequence of thought underlying it, but with an entire irregularity of o...

Everyone must find out for himself what are the holiest and most permanent things in life, and worship them sincerely and steadfastly, allowing no conventionality, no sense of s...

The old life of Cambridge--it was all there, after the long years, just the same, full of freshness and laughter; but I came into it as a _revenant_, and yet with no sense of sa...

It was in the course of the year after the birth of the child that I became aware that something had gone wrong; a shadow seemed to have fallen upon them. I became aware in the...

_A blunt and candid critic, commenting on Keats' famous axiom, "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty," said: "Then what is the use of having two words for the same thing?" And it is tr...