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Dr. Dillon to Edward Delaney, Esq. , at The Pines, near Rye, N. H.
August 8, 1872.
My Dear Sir—I am happy to assure you that your anxiety is without reason. Flemming will be confined to the sofa for three or four weeks, and will have to be careful at first how he uses his leg. [...]

I
OF course that was not his name. Even in the State of Maine, where it is still a custom to maim a child for life by christening him Arioch or Shadrach or Ephraim, nobody would dream of calling a boy “Quite So.” It was merely a nickname which we gave him in camp; it [...]

The folk who lived in Shakespeare’s dayAnd saw that gentle figure passBy London Bridge, his frequent way–They little knew what man he was.
The pointed beard, the courteous mien,The equal port to high and low,All this they saw or might have seen–But not the light behind the brow!
The doublet’s modest gray or brown,The slender sword-hilt’s plain [...]

Pillared arch and sculptured towerOf Ilium have had their hour;The dust of many a king is blownOn the winds from zone to zone;Many a warrior sleeps unknown.Time and Death hold each in thrall,Yet is Love the lord of all;Still does Helen’s beauty stirBecause a poet sang of her!

TO EDWIN BOOTH.
MY DEAR BOOTH:
In offering these verses to you, I beg you to treat them (as you have many a time advised a certain lord chamberlain to treat the players) not according to their desert. “Use them after your own honor and dignity; the less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty.”
These [...]

Listen, my masters! I speak naught but truth.From dawn to dawn they drifted on and on,Not knowing whither nor to what dark end.Now the North froze them, now the hot South scorched.Some called to God, and found great comfort so;Some gnashed their teeth with curses, and some laughedAn empty laughter, seeing they yet lived,So sweet [...]

I vex me not with brooding on the yearsThat were ere I drew breath: why should I thenDistrust the darkness that may fall againWhen life is done? Perchance in other spheres–Dead planets–I once tasted mortal tears,And walked as now among a throng of men,Pondering things that lay beyond my ken,Questioning death, and solacing my fears.Ofttimes [...]

I
One by one they goInto the unknown dark–Star-lit brows of the brave,Voices that drew men’s souls.Rich is the land, O Death!Can give you dead like our dead!–Such as he from whose handThe magic web of romanceSlipt, and the art was lost!Such as he who erewhile–The last of the Titan brood–With his thunder the Senate shook;Or [...]

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Who can say where Echo dwells?In some mountain-cave, methinks,Where the white owl sits and blinks;Or in deep sequestered dells,Where the foxglove hangs its bells,Echo dwells.Echo!Echo!
II
Phantom of the crystal Air,Daughter of sweet Mystery!Here is one has need of thee;Lead him to thy secret lair,Myrtle brings he for thy hair–Hear his prayer,Echo!Echo!
III
Echo, lift thy drowsy head,And repeat [...]

GLOUCESTER, AUGUST, 1720
The wind it wailed, the wind it moaned,And the white caps flecked the sea;“An’ I would to God,” the skipper groaned,“I had not my boy with me!”
Snug in the stern-sheets, little JohnLaughed as the scud swept by;But the skipper’s sunburnt cheek grew wanAs he watched the wicked sky.
“Would he were at his mother’s [...]

[One of the Bearers soliloquizes:]
. . . Room in your heart for him, O Mother Earth,Who loved each flower and leaf that made you fair,And sang your praise in verses manifoldAnd delicate, with here and there a lineFrom end to end in blossom like a boughThe May breathes on, so rich it was. Some thoughtThe [...]

[Note: Batuschka: "Little Father," or "Dear Little Father," a term of endearment applied to the Tsar in Russian folk-song.]
From yonder gilded minaretBeside the steel-blue Neva set,I faintly catch, from time to time,The sweet, aerial midnight chime–“God save the Tsar!”
Above the ravelins and the moatsOf the white citadel it floats;And men in dungeons far beneathListen, and [...]

[Midnight.]
First, two white arms that held him very close,And ever closer as he drew him backReluctantly, the loose gold-colored hairA thousand delicate fibres reaching outStill to detain him; then some twenty stepsOf iron staircase winding round and down,And ending in a narrow gallery hungWith Gobelin tapestries–AndromedaRescued by Perseus, and the sleek DianaWith her nymphs bathing; [...]

A. D. 1670
AGLAE, a widowMURIEL, her unmarried sister.
IT happened once, in that brave land that liesFor half the twelvemonth wrapt in sombre skies,Two sisters loved one man. He being dead,Grief loosed the lips of her he had not wed,And all the passion that through heavy yearsHad masked in smiles unmasked itself in tears.No purer love [...]

1851-1870
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Now there was one who came in later daysTo play at Emperor: in the dead of nightStole crown and sceptre, and stood forth to lightIn sudden purple. The dawn’s straggling raysShowed Paris fettered, murmuring in amaze,With red hands at her throat–a piteous sight.Then the new Caesar, stricken with affrightAt his own daring, shrunk from public [...]

“The Southern Transept,hardly known by any other name but Poet’s Corner.”
DEAN STANLEY.
TREAD softly here; the sacredest of tombsAre those that hold your Poets. Kings and queensAre facile accidents of Time and Chance.Chance sets them on the heights, they climb not there!But he who from the darkling mass of menIs on the wing of heavenly thought [...]

IN my early Boston days a gentle soul was often to be met with about town, furtively haunting old book-shops and dusty editorial rooms, a man of ingratiating simplicity of manner, who always spoke in a low, hesitating voice, with a note of refinement in it. He was a devout worshiper of Elia, and wrote [...]

WHEN an English novelist does us the honor to introduce any of our countrymen into his fiction, he generally displays a commendable desire to present something typical in the way of names for his adopted characters–to give a dash of local color, as it were, with his nomenclature. His success is seldom commensurate to the [...]

(An episode from The Story of a Bad Boy, the narrator being Tom Bailey, the hero of the tale.)
Every Rivermouth boy looks upon the sea as being in some way mixed up with his destiny. While he is yet a baby lying in his cradle, he hears the dull, far-off boom of the breakers; when [...]

PISCATAQUA RIVER
Thou singest by the gleaming isles,By woods, and fields of corn,Thou singest, and the sunlight smilesUpon my birthday morn.
But I within a city, I,So full of vague unrest,Would almost give my life to lieAn hour upon upon thy breast.
To let the wherry listless go,And, wrapt in dreamy joy,Dip, and surge idly to and fro,Like [...]

IN his Memoirs, Kropotkin states the singular fact that the natives of the Malayan Archipelago have an idea that something is extracted from them when their likenesses are taken by photography. Here is the motive for a fantastic short story, in which the hero–an author in vogue or a popular actor–might be depicted as having [...]

I.
At five o’clock on the morning of the tenth of July, 1860, the front door of a certain house on Anchor Street, in the ancient seaport town of Rivermouth, might have been observed to open with great caution. This door, as the least imaginative reader may easily conjecture, did not open itself. It was opened [...]

One morning as I was passing through Boston Common, which lies between my home and my office, I met a gentleman lounging along The Mall. I am generally preoccupied when walking, and often thread my way through crowded streets without distinctly observing any one. But this man’s face forced itself upon me, and a singular [...]

I. THE OLD TAVERN AT BAYLEY’S FOUR CORNERS.
You will not find Greenton, or Bayley’s Four-Corners, as it is more usually designated, on any map of New England that I know of. It is not a town; it is not even a village; it is merely an absurd hotel. The almost indescribable place called Greenton is [...]

When I saw the little house building, an eighth of a mile beyond my own, on the Old Bay Road, I wondered who were to be the tenants. The modest structure was set well back from the road, among the trees, as if the inmates were to care nothing whatever for a view of the [...]

Near the Levee, and not far from the old French Cathedral in the Place d’Armes, at New Orleans, stands a fine date-palm, thirty feet in height, spreading its broad leaves in the alien air as hardily as if its sinuous roots were sucking strength from their native earth.
Sir Charles Lyell, in his Second Visit to [...]

I
The recruiting-office at Rivermouth was in a small, unpainted, weather- stained building on Anchor Street, not far from the custom-house. The tumble-down shell had long remained tenantless, and now, with its mouse- colored exterior, easily lent itself to its present requirements as a little military mouse-trap. In former years it had been occupied as a [...]

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Mrs. Wesley frequently embarrasses me by remarking in the presence of other persons–our intimate friends, of course–”Wesley, you are not brilliant, but you are good.”
From Mrs. Wesley’s outlook, which is that of a very high ideal, there is nothing uncomplimentary in the remark, nothing so intended, but I must confess that I have sometimes felt [...]

Weep with me, all you that readThis little story;And know, for whom a tear you shed,Death’s self is sorry.
Ben Jonson.
This story is no invention of mine. I could not invent anything half so lovely and pathetic as seems to me the incident which has come ready-made to my hand.
Some of you, doubtless, have heard of [...]

I.
We are accustomed to speak with a certain light irony of the tendency which women have to gossip, as if the sin itself, if it is a sin, were of the gentler sex, and could by no chance be a masculine peccadillo. So far as my observation goes, men are as much given to small [...]

I.
It was close upon eleven o’clock when I stepped out of the rear vestibule of the Boston Theatre, and, passing through the narrow court that leads to West Street, struck across the Common diagonally. Indeed, as I set foot on the Tremont Street mall, I heard the Old South drowsily sounding the hour.
It was a [...]