The Divine Comedy

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by Dante Alighieri

popular authors

Ralph Waldo Emerson

(1803-1882)

American Transcendentalist poet, philosopher, lecturer, and essayist wrote Nature (1836): To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will...

Charles Dickens

(1812-1870)

English Victorian era author wrote numerous highly acclaimed novels including his most autobiographical David Copperfield (1848-1850): "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have..."

D.H. Lawrence

(1885-1930)

English novelist, storywriter, critic, poet and painter, one of the greatest figures in 20th-century English literature. "Snake" and "How Beastly the Bourgeoisie is" are probably his most anthologized poems. David Herbert Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885, in Nottinghamshire, central England. He was the fourth child of a struggling coal miner who was a...

George MacDonald

(1824-1905)

Scottish novelist, clergyman and author of children's stories was admired by many of his peers for his tender spirituality through his graceful poems and fantastical verse. They rank high among the classics of juvenile literature. In his George MacDonald: An Anthology (1947) C. S. Lewis states that while reading a copy of MacDonald's Phantastes..."

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quotes of the week

"To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else."
~Emily Dickinson

"'Tut, tut, child,' said the Duchess. 'Everything's got a moral if only you can find it.'"
~Lewis Carroll,
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

"Youth is wholly experimental."
~Robert Louis Stevenson,
"A Letter to a Young Gentleman"

"Too busy with the crowded hour to fear to live or die."
~Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Quatrains, "Nature"

"Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable."
~L. Frank Baum,
The Wizard of Oz

"Earth with her thousand voices praises God."
~Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni

popular works

Macbeth

Written between 1611-12; First performed in 1623

Macbeth captures the timeless nature of the human experience... There is greed for power, murderous evil scheming, and the nobility of the fight for good and evil. The tortuous guilty self-flagellation that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth succumb to is such a base human...

A Tale of Two Cities

Written in 1859

As an example of Dickens's literary work, A Tale of Two Cities is not wrongly named. It is his most typical contact with the civic ideals of Europe. All his other tales have been tales of one city. He was in spirit a Cockney; though that title has been quite...

Gulliver's Travels

Written in 1726

The author of these Travels, Mr. Lemuel Gulliver, is my ancient and intimate friend; there is likewise some relation between us on the mother's side. About three years ago, Mr. Gulliver growing weary of the concourse of curious people coming to...