Hawthorne's tale about the brooding hold of the past over the present is a complex one, twisting and turning its way back through many generations of a venerable New England family, one of whose members was accused of witchcraft in 17th century Salem. More than 200 years later, we meet the family in its decaying, gabled mansion, still haunted by the presence of dead ancestors: Hepzibah, an elderly gentlewoman fallen on bad times; her ineffectual brother, Clifford; and young Phoebe, a country maiden who cheerfully takes it upon herself to care for her two doddering relations. There's also Holgrave, a free-spirited daguerreotypist, who makes a surprising transformation into conventional respectability at the story's end. - School Library Journal A large and generous production, pervaded with that vague hum, that indefinable echo, of the whole multitudinous life of man, which is the real sign of a great work of fiction. - Henry James Introduction by Basil Davenport. Also includes the author's original preface.

The Romans conquered most of the known world and detailed their conquests in calm, unapologetic histories. They were a supremely urbane people who longed poetically for the farming life. Valuing toughness and practicality in all things, they turned the love poem into a cynical rebuke and wrote tragedies in which the unfathomable actions of gods gave way to the staggering cruelties of man. As the empire slid into decay, Tacitus pulled back the curtain on the perverse intrigues of the emperors, and a Roman-educated Christian named Augustine recounted his spiritual awakening in what may be the world's first psychological novel.

This collection presents the essential writings of the Romans in their finest English translations: the comedies of Terence and Plautus; the histories of Julius Caesar, Livy and Tacitus; the oratory of Cicero; poems by Catullus, Virgil, Horace, and Martial; the philosophy of Lucretius and Boethius, along with the stylishly narrated and often ribald myths of Ovid and Apuleius.