| | 21 | Author: | Wharton review: Anonymous | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | About Mrs. Wharton, in "Chronicle and Comment"  | | | | Published: | 1996 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | According to certain chroniclers in the daily press, Mrs. Wharton
is going to write no more long novels, but will devote herself to
serious historical composition. We are glad that she has abjured long
novels, but deplore her intention of becoming an historian. There are
scores of historians busily at work, many of them very good ones, but
where shall we find another writer who could give us such remarkable
work as that contained in The Greater Inclination? It is pure
perversity to give up doing the thing that one can do best in order to
waste time over that which many others can do better. We have a
certain right to speak out frankly on this subject, because we were
among the very first to greet Mrs. Wharton as a writer of very rare
gifts and of unusual distinction. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 22 | Author: | Anonymous | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | In a Fog | | | | Published: | 1994 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | A FEW minutes before one o'clock on the morning of Sunday, the
8th of February, 1857, Policeman Smithers, of the Third District, was
meditatively pursuing his path of duty through the quietest streets of
Ward Five, beguiling, as usual, the weariness of his watch by
reminiscent Aethiopianisms, mellifluous in design, though not severely
artistic in execution. Passing from the turbulent precincts of Portland
and Causeway Streets, he had entered upon the solitudes of Green Street,
along which he now dragged himself dreamily enough, ever extracting
consolations from lugubrious cadences mournfully intoned. Very silent
was the neighborhood. Very dismal the night. Very dreary and damp
was Mr. Smithers; for a vile fog wrapped itself around him, filling his
body with moist misery, and his mind with anticipated rheumatic
horrors. Still he surged heavily along, tired Nature with tuneful charms
sweetly restoring. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 26 | Author: | Anonymous | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | Watching the Crops | | | | Published: | 1994 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | THE members of civilized and artificially organized
communities, who buy their food at markets, can gain from their own
experience but little idea of the watchful and anxious interest
attending the care of growing crops by those populations who must
depend directly upon the product of their fields for subsistence.
To the inhabitants of purely agricultural districts a loss of the
annual harvest means deprivation, and perhaps hunger and famine;
and naturally they have a constant realization of the fact that the
welfare of their whole community is bound up in the promise of the
heading wheat and tasselling corn. Between seed-time and harvest
the husbandman's task is an incessant and arduous one. Weeds must
be kept down, every means of diminishing the ill effects of drought
or of over-moisture must be adopted, the danger from floods
obviated as far as possible, and vigilant guard kept that marauders
shall not deprive him of the reward of his labors. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 27 | Author: | Anonymous | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | "St. Elmo" and its Author | | | | Published: | 1995 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | In the rush to keep any sort of pace with the lighter and noisier
literature of the day it is pleasant and worth while occasionally
to spend a few minutes looking over the publishers' lists at the
ends of the popular novels of thirty odd years ago, and from them
to contrast the tastes of the past and the present generations—a
contrast which is very far from being entirely flattering to the
readers of to-day. At the head of such lists we may be sure to
find the names of those writers who corresponded with the authors
of what are now known as "the best sellers"—we realise the claims
that Mary J. Holmes and Ann S. Stevens and Augusta J. Evans and May
Agnes Fleming then had to popular attention. We recognise many
laudable ambitions in the advertisements of books dealing with "the
habits of good society," with "the nice points of taste and good
manners, and the art of making oneself agreeable," with "the art of
polite conversation," and the forms in which letters of business,
of friendship, of society, of respectful endearment should be
couched. At first sight all this is likely to provoke rather
contemptuous amusement. And how unjustly! The forms may be quaint
and obsolete, but the sentiments are homely and praiseworthy, and
in similar literature of to-day there are just as many platitudes,
just as much that is silly and not nearly so much that is sincere.
The average highly successful novel of that time was no more
literature than is the average highly successful novel of to-day,
and the old was generally marked, it must be acknowledged, by an
airiness and pedantry that to-day would not reach the public
without pretty severe editing. On the other hand, however, the old
novels almost always had stories to tell, and they told them in a
manner to make them from end to end vitally interesting to that
class of readers to which they were designed to appeal. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 28 | Author: | Crane review: Anonymous | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | English Views of Stephen Crane. | | | | Published: | 1996 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | THE late Mr. Stephen Crane was, as is well known, much more of a
prophet in England than in his own country, and during his latter
years he found it pleasant to make his home in a land where his
work met with such warm appreciation. Since his death, the English
critical journals have with little or no exception expressed a high
judgment of his literary abilities. The Academy (June 9)
says: | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 29 | Author: | Anonymous | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | Facts. By a Woman | | | | Published: | 1997 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | Debating the question of ways and means, . . . I was prompted instinctively to pick up a city
newspaper . . . my visionary mind was mechanically drawn down through its newsy page to a
single item of distinctive meaning, so electrifying and magically warming my freezing life-current,
that I was instantly thrown into complete respiration and retroaction. It was a simple
announcement, an advertisement only, of A. Roman & Co., who wanted agents to canvass "Tom
Sawyer," Mark Twain's new book. I had been led to it by a mysterious guidance . . . . | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 30 | Author: | Anonymous | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | The Grindwell Governing Machine | | | | Published: | 1994 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | On the other side of the Atlantic there is a populous city called
Grandville. It is, as its name indicates, a great city, — but it is said that
it thinks itself a good deal greater than it really is. I meant to say that
Grandville was its original name, and the name by which even at the
present day it is called by its own citizens. But there are certain wits, or
it may be, vulgar people, who by some process have converted this name
into Grindwell. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 31 | Author: | Anonymous | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | The Indian of Commerce | | | | Published: | 1996 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | For purposes of literary classification, all Indians may be divided, quite
regardless of linguistic affinities, into three sole tribes—the human,
the inhuman, and the super-human. There is the actual aborigine, interesting to
competent fiction as to science because he is a man and at the same time a
living archive from the childhood of the race. There is the wooden eikon which
stands for questionable cigars or unquestionable penny-a-lining—in
either case a mere peg upon which to hang commercial profit. And there is also
the Red Man of Rhapsody—a conveniently distant fiction to carry
heroics which would seem rather too absurd if fathered upon poor human nature as
we see it next door. With the last-mentioned tribe deals one of the handsomest
and one of the most preposterous books of the season, 'A Child of the Sun,' by
Charles Eugene Banks (Stone). Brilliant as a parrot in mechanical coloration,
the text also seems to have undergone some mental "three-color process."
Fenimore Cooper was cold ethnography to this, and even Prescott's Empire of
Montezuma quite as true to life. There is nothing Indian in these pages, except
the good intention. A curbstone version of the "legend" of the Piasau serves for
warp; and into it the author has woven a truly curious fabric of girl-graduate
mundiloquence and scope. Nominally in prose, the book is in fact very largely
couched in wilful and poor Hiawathan measure, doubly cheap by being masked in
"long type." Perhaps the most diagrammatic comment on the quality of the volume
is in its own exemplary lines about "Pakoble," belle of the "Arctide" tribe, who
was "so perfect in beauty that the artists of the Arctides often begged the
favor of her time, that they might preserve her loveliness to future
generations." It must be said that the fifteen "color-type" illustrations, by
Louis Betts, are far and away above their company and their sort. Of no value as
racial types, they are very uncommonly attractive and sympathetic, and not
without a touch of real poetry in conception as well as in color-scheme. Its
whole dress would befit a worthier volume. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 33 | Author: | Crane review: Anonymous | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | The Last of Stephen Crane. | | | | Published: | 1996 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | THE collection of stories about the Spanish-American war upon which
Mr. Crane was engaged at the time of his death, has lately appeared
in book form under the title "Wounds in the Rain." The St.
James's Gazette (London, September 27) thinks that in a few of
the stories he rises almost, tho not quite, to the level of his
masterpiece, "The Red Badge of Courage." It says: | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 34 | Author: | Anonymous | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | Literary Chat | | | | Published: | 1994 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | Europe appears to be exerting more and more of an attractive
power over our literary men. Henry James has lived abroad so
long that he may almost be considered to have expatriated
himself; Bret Harte has of late years so thoroughly identified
himself with England that his stories now always appear there
before they do here; Frank Stockton is making a prolonged visit
on the other side and a newspaper paragraph announces that Mark
Twain is in Geneva so often that many believe him to have taken
up his residence there. He himself declares that it is the Alps
that draw him thither so frequently. "They follow me
everywhere," he says, "and I cannot get away from them." | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 36 | Author: | Anonymous | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | Mary Somerville | | | | Published: | 1994 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | THERE have been in every age a few women of genius who have
become the successful rivals of man in the paths which they have
severally chosen. Three instances are of our time. Mrs. Browning is
called a poet even by poets; the artists admit that Rosa Bonheur is a
painter; and the mathematicians accord to Mary Somerville a high rank
among themselves. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 37 | Author: | Anonymous | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | Octave Thanet | | | | Published: | 1999 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | WHEN, a decade ago, some one asked "Octave Thanet" to state
where she would like to live, her reply was: "Nowhere all the year
round." And if you care to make an attempt to trace Miss French's
whereabouts you will very likely discover that she is living up to her
declaration. A modern captain of industry
is not more at home anywhere than this
delightful writer of short stories — a literary lapidary she might well
be termed, so absolutely clean-cut and brilliant is her work. Miss
French has been complimented by pastmasters of the art of literary
criticism for work of a widely diversified character. She shows a
remarkable familiarity with life in our bustling west, as well as with
that of our less assertive south. We marvel at this, when we
consider that her birth and education is of New England. However,
the fact that fate compelled her to take up residence in Iowa, and
inclination led her to spend a part of the year in the south, accounts
for those characteristics in her work that are reflective of the
sections, and which might possibly puzzle an unsophisticated reader
concerning the personality of the author. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 38 | Author: | Anonymous | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | Elizabeth Sara Sheppard | | | | Published: | 1994 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | YOU ask from me some particulars of the valued life so recently
closed. Miss Sheppard was my friend of many years; I was with her to
the last hour of her existence; but this is not the time for other than a
brief notice of her career, and I comply with your request by sending
you a slight memorial, hardly full enough for publication. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 40 | Author: | Antibiastes | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | Observations on the slaves and the indented servants, inlisted in the army,
and in the navy of the United States. | | | | Published: | 1995 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | THE Resolve of Congress, for prohibiting the importation of
Slaves, demonstrates the consistent zeal of our rulers in the cause of mankind.
They have endeavoured, as early and as extensively as it then was in their
power, to reform our morals, by checking the progress of the general
depravation, which, sooner or later, proves the ruin of the countries, where
domestic slavery is introduced. From the liberal spirit of that resolve, which,
soon after, was most cheerfully supported by their constituents, it is natural
to infer that, had not the necessity of repelling the hostilities of powerful
invaders so deeply engaged the attention of the several legislative bodies of
our Union, laws would, long since, have been made, with every precaution, which
our safety might have dictated, for facilitating emancipations. Many Slaves,
however, too many perhaps, are incautiously allowed to fight under our banners.
They share in the dangers and glory of the efforts made by US, the freeborn
members of the United States, to enjoy, undisturbed, the common rights of human
nature; and THEY remain SLAVES! | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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