Best of
Literary-Criticism

1902

The Complete Works, Vol 10: Miscellany


Edgar Allan Poe - 1902
    Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1902. Excerpt: ... Eureka AN ESSAY ON THE MATERIAL AND SPIRITUAL UNIVERSE To the few who love me and whom I love, to those who feel rather than to those who think, to the dreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in the only realities, I offer this book of truths, not in its character of truth-teller, but for the beauty that abounds in its truth, constituting it true. To these I present the composition as an art-product alone--let us say as a romance; or, if I be not urging too lofty a claim, as a poem. What I here propound is true: --therefore it cannot die; or, if by any means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will "rise again to the Life Everlasting." Nevertheless it is as a poem only that I wish this work to be judged after I am dead. T is with humility really unassumed, --it is with a sentiment even of awe, --that I pen the opening sentence of this work; for of all conceivable subjects I approach the reader with the most solemn, the most comprehensive, the most difficult, the most august. What terms shall I find sufficiently simple in their sublimity, sufficiently sublime in their simplicity, for the mere enunciation of my theme? I design to speak of the physical, metaphysical, and mathematical--of the material and spiritual universe--of its essence, its origin, its creation, its present condition, and its destiny. I shall be so rash, moreover, as to challenge the conclusions, and thus, in effect, to question the sagacity, of many of the greatest and most justly reverenced of men. In the beginning, let me as distinctly as possible announce, not the theorem which I hope to demonstrate--for, whatever the mathematicians may assert, there is, in this world at least, no such thing as demonstration--but the ruling idea which, throughout this volume, I shall be conti...

The memoirs of François René, vicomte de Chateaubriand, sometime ambassador to England, Volume 1 of 6


François-René de Chateaubriand - 1902
    Being a translation by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos of the Mémoires d'outre-tombe, with illustrations from contemporary sources.

The memoirs of François René, vicomte de Chateaubriand, sometime ambassador to England, Volume 4 of 6


François-René de Chateaubriand - 1902