| | 21 | Author: | Morris, William | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | A Dream of John Ball and a King's Lesson  | | | | Published: | 1994 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | SOMETIMES I am rewarded for fretting myself so much about
present matters by a quite unasked-for pleasant dream. I mean
when I am asleep. This dream is as it were a present of an
architectural peep-show. I see some beautiful and noble building
new made, as it were for the occasion, as clearly as if I were
awake; not vaguely or absurdly, as often happens in dreams, but
with all the detail clear and reasonable. Some Elizabethan house
with its scrap of earlier fourteenth-century building, and its
later degradations of Queen Anne and Silly Billy{A} and Victoria,
marring but not destroying it, in an old village
once a clearing
amid the sandy woodlands of Sussex. Or an old and unusually
curious church, much churchwardened, and beside it a fragment of
fifteenth-century domestic architecture amongst the not
unpicturesque lath and plaster of an Essex farm, and looking
natural enough among the sleepy elms and the meditative hens
scratching about in the litter of the farmyard, whose trodden
yellow straw comes up to the very jambs of the richly carved
Norman doorway of the church. Or sometimes 'tis a splendid
collegiate church, untouched by restoring parson and architect,
standing amid an island of shapely trees and flower-beset
cottages of thatched grey stone and cob, amidst the narrow
stretch of bright green water-meadows that wind between the
sweeping Wiltshire downs, so well beloved of William Cobbett. Or
some new-seen and yet familiar cluster of houses in a grey
village of the upper Thames over
topped by the delicate tracery of a fourteenth-century church; or
even sometimes the very buildings of the past untouched by the
degradation of the sordid utilitarianism that cares not and knows
not of beauty and history: as once, when I was journeying (in a
dream of the night) down the well-remembered reaches of the
Thames betwixt Streatley and Wallingford, where the foothills of
the White Horse fall back from the broad stream, I came upon a
clear-seen mediæval town standing up with roof and tower and
spire within its walls, grey and ancient, but untouched from the
days of its builders of old. All this I have seen in the dreams
of the night clearer than I can force myself to see them in
dreams of the day. So that it would have been nothing new to me
the other night to fall into an architectural dream if that were
all, and yet I have to tell of things strange and new that befell
me after I had fallen asleep. I had begun my sojourn in the Land
of Nod by a
very confused attempt to conclude that it was all right for me to
have an engagement to lecture at Manchester and Mitcham Fair
Green at half-past eleven at night on one and the same Sunday,
and that I could manage pretty well. And then I had gone on to
try to make the best of addressing a large open-air audience in
the costume I was really then wearing—to wit, my night-shirt,
reinforced for the dream occasion by a pair of braceless
trousers. The consciousness of this fact so bothered me, that
the earnest faces of my audience—who would
not notice it, but were clearly preparing
terrible anti-Socialist posers for me—began to fade away and my
dream grew thin, and I awoke (as I thought) to find myself lying
on a strip of wayside waste by an oak copse just outside a
country village. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 25 | Author: | Quayle, William A. | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | A Hero — Jean Valjean | | | | Published: | 1994 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | THE hero is not a luxury, but a necessity.
We can no more do without him than we
can do without the sky. Every best man and
woman is at heart a hero-worshiper. Emerson
acutely remarks that all men admire Napoleon
because he was themselves in possibility. They
were in miniature what he was developed. For
a like though nobler reason, all men love heroes.
They are ourselves grown tall, puissant, victorious,
and sprung into nobility, worth, service. The hero
electrifies the world; he is the lightning of the soul,
illuminating our sky, clarifying the air, making it
thereby salubrious and delightful. What any elect
spirit did, inures to the credit of us all. A
fragment of Lowell's clarion verse may stand for the
biography of heroism: | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 26 | Author: | Rinehart, Mary Roberts | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | The Circular Staircase | | | | Published: | 1994 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | THIS is the story of how a middle-aged spinster lost her mind,
deserted her domestic gods in the city, took a furnished house
for the summer out of town, and found herself involved in one of
those mysterious crimes that keep our newspapers and detective
agencies happy and prosperous. For twenty years I had been
perfectly comfortable; for twenty years I had had the window-boxes filled in the spring, the carpets lifted, the awnings put
up and the furniture covered with brown linen; for as many
summers I had said good-by to my friends, and, after watching
their perspiring hegira, had settled down to a delicious quiet in
town, where the mail comes three times a day, and the water
supply does not depend on a tank on the roof. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 27 | Author: | Rinehart, Mary Roberts | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | Where there's a Will | | | | Published: | 1994 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | WHEN it was all over Mr. Sam came out to the spring-house to
say good-by to me before he and Mrs. Sam left. I hated to see
him go, after all we had been through together, and I suppose he
saw it in my face, for he came over close and stood looking down
at me, and smiling. "You saved us, Minnie," he said, "and I
needn't tell you we're grateful; but do you know what I think?"
he asked, pointing his long forefinger at me. "I think you've
enjoyed it even when you were suffering most. Red-haired women
are born to intrigue, as the sparks fly upward." | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 29 | Author: | Tarkington, Booth, 1869-1946 | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | The Flirt | | | | Published: | 1994 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | Valentine Corliss walked up Corliss Street the hottest afternoon
of that hot August, a year ago, wearing a suit of white serge
which attracted a little attention from those observers who were
able to observe anything except the heat. The coat was shaped
delicately; it outlined the wearer, and, fitting him as women's
clothes fit women, suggested an effeminacy not an attribute of
the tall Corliss. The effeminacy belonged all to the tailor, an
artist plying far from Corliss Street, for the coat would have
encountered a hundred of its fellows at Trouville or Ostende this
very day. Corliss Street is the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, the
Park Lane, the Fifth Avenue, of Capitol City, that smoky
illuminant of our great central levels, but although it esteems
itself an established cosmopolitan thoroughfare, it is still
provincial enough to be watchful; and even in its torrid languor
took some note of the alien garment. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 35 | Author: | Wharton, Edith, 1862-1937 | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | The Choice | | | | Published: | 1994 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | Stilling, that night after dinner, had surpassed himself. He
always did, Wrayford reflected, when the small fry from Highfield
came to dine. He, Cobham Stilling, who had to find his bearings,
keep to his level, in the big, heedless, oppressive world of New
York, dilated and grew vast in the congenial medium of Highfield.
The Red House was the biggest house of the Highfield summer colony,
as Cobham Stilling was its biggest man. No one else within a
radius of a hundred miles (on a conservative estimate) had as many
horses, as many greenhouses, as many servants, and assuredly no one
else had two motors, or a motor-boat for the lake. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 38 | 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 |
| 39 | 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 |
| 40 | 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 |
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