As one of the world's most loved poets, Rumi's poems are celebrated for their message of love and their beauty, but too often they are stripped of their mystical and spiritual meanings. The Gift of Rumi offers a new reading of Rumi, contextualising his work against the broader backdrop of Islamic mysticism and adding a richness and authenticity that is lacking in many Westernized conceptions of his work. Author Emily O'Dell has studied Sufism both academically, in her work and research at Harvard, Columbia, and the American University of Beirut, and in practice, learning from a Mevlevi master and his whirling dervishes. She weaves this expertise throughout The Gift of Rumi, sharing a new vision of Rumi's classic work. At the heart of Rumi's mystical poetry is the "religion of love" which transcends all religions. Through his majestic verses of ecstasy and longing, Rumi invites us into the religion of the heart and guides us to our own loving inner essence. The Gifts of Rumi gives us a key to experiencing this profound and powerful invitation, allowing readers to meet the master in a new way.

Since the publication of the first volume of "In Search of the Lost," Volume Two, still the poems in this work are a humble attempt to explore our human search for meaning and purpose. We hope you enjoy the poems in Volume Two. We believe both works should be explored together. Included in the Second Volume of "In Search of the Lost," by Emily Jane Elliott and Jeffrey Eugene Elliott are four poems originally included in the First Volume of "In Search of the Lost." The four poems from the first volume also included in this volume are, Streets of Fire, Gauisus Dia, Heaven Descends to Dwell, Amelia and Memories. Additionally, the poem, "Search" was added upon from the version found in Volume One. We hope that you enjoy Volume Two as much as readers indicated they enjoyed Volume One. This poetry is dedicated to Owen, Ryder, Matthew and Trace with great love and pride.

The poems in this work are a humble attempt to explore our human search for meaning and purpose.

A laugh-out-loud, brilliantly wacky, highly illustrated children's debut for readers of 8+ from an award-winning comedy writer - a perfect longer read for fans of Pamela Butchart and Grimwood. Maggie McKay is NOT happy that her mum has decided to move from their flat in Leicester to a house in Knobbly Bottom (the most BORING village ever invented). Knobbly Bottom has got NO soft play centres, NO toy shops and NO horse that her mum had (sort of) promised her. There are just fields, church fetes, and a bunch of boring old sheep! But Maggie soon discovers that Knobbly Bottom is also full of SECRETS. The sheep are growing FANGS, their eyes are turning RED, and they're planning to take over the world... When Mum thinks she's just making up another silly story, it's up to Maggie, her little sister Lily and their new friend Fred - with the help of a strange old lady called Nan Helsing and some stinky garlic bread - to save Knobbly Bottom from the ATTACK OF THE VAMPIRE SHEEP! Genuinely laugh-out-loud jokes and puns on every page to delight kids and grown-ups alike, with an instantly relatable cast of family and friends Hilarious black-and-white artwork and dynamic design throughout, ideal even for readers who lack confidence A fiercely determined girl hero and a cast of brilliant monster-battling characters!

In Gondal’s Queen, Fannie Elizabeth Ratchford presents a cycle of eighty-four poems by Emily Jane Brontë, for the first time arranged in logical sequence, to re-create the “novel in verse� which Emily wrote about their beloved mystical kingdom of Gondal and its ruler, Augusta Geraldine Almeda, who brought tragedy to those who loved her. Thanks to previous publications by Ratchford, the imaginative world of Gondal is well known not only to Brontë scholars but also to general readers. Only in the present book, however, with Emily’s lovely poems restored to the setting which gave them being, can the full impact of this extraordinary literary creation be realized. The life story of Gondal’s Queen, from portentous birth to tragic death, is set in a world compounded of dark Gothic romance and Byronic extravagance; yet out of it emerges not only a real country of wild moor sheep and piercingly beautiful nights but also the portrait of a real woman, whose doom was wrought not by the stars but by the clashing complications of her own nature. In A.G.A. (the appellation most usually applied to the Queen), Emily Brontë created a personality, not a puppet reciting lovely lines. And Ratchford, in reconstructing her story, has re-affirmed the dignity, beauty, and richness of Emily’s poetry. Gondal’s Queen is the end of a long trail of research and literary detection which has led Ratchford to all known Brontë documentary sources. This quest was originally stimulated by curiosity over a tiny booklet signed, “C. Brontë, June 29th, 1837,� in the Wrenn Library at the University of Texas at Austin. Ratchford’s intense and astonishingly fruitful interest in the Brontës had its origin in her attempt to unravel the fascinating puzzle presented by this little book, which seemed to be merely a series of childish vignettes held together by “a shadow of a common character� and a “tendency toward a unified plot.� Bit by bit, Ratchford assembled clues from manuscripts and obscure publications until the significance of the play world of the Brontë children began to emerge. In spite of the fact that the Brontës had been the subject of the liveliest literary speculation since their deaths, it remained for Ratchford to establish the importance of their juvenile writings to the later writings of Charlotte. In successive publications she presented the accumulating evidence. For a time her curiosity was centered on Charlotte and the group, but it finally became focused on Emily through a manuscript journal fragment which fortunately came to hand. Unlike Charlotte, Emily left no prose works from her childhood. But it is apparent from journal entries and birthday notes written by Emily and Anne (whose shared creation Gondal was) not only that the two younger Brontës lived in and sustained daily an imaginary world which had evolved from the earlier play of the four children together, but also that they had written separately voluminous histories and “novels� about it. Of Emily’s vast Gondal literature, only a small body of verse has survived, poems originally intended for no eye but her own and possibly Anne’s. But it is clear that Gondal was not only Emily Brontë’s childhood dream world but also the major preoccupation of her adult creative life.

A laugh-out-loud, brilliantly wacky, highly illustrated adventure for readers of 8+ from an award-winning comedy writer - a perfect longer read for fans of Pamela Butchart and Grimwood. Someone or something in the village of Knobbly Bottom is eating up EVERYTHING! When a chocolate cake goes missing, Maggie gets the blame. But when entire vegetable plots are devoured overnight, huge bite marks are found in garden furniture and even her friend Fred's grandad's disgusting courgettes are gobbled up, she kicks off an investigation! However, when the ravenous local pigs start doubling in size and acting VERY strangely, Maggie and Fred wonder whether they have bitten off more than they can chew. How can they fend off the rise of the ZOMBIE PIGS? Genuinely laugh-out-loud jokes and puns on every page to delight kids and grown-ups alike, with an instantly relatable cast of family and friends Hilarious black-and-white artwork and dynamic design throughout, ideal even for readers who lack confidence A fiercely determined girl hero and a cast of brilliant monster-battling characters!

The integration of the blind into society has always meant taking on prejudices and inaccurate representations. Weygand's highly accessible anthropological and cultural history introduces us to both real and imaginary figures from the past, uncovering French attitudes towards the blind from the Middle Ages through the first half of the nineteenth century. Much of the book, however, centers on the eighteenth century, the enlightened age of Diderot's emblematic blind man and of the Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, founded by Valentin Hauy, the great benefactor of blind people.
Weygand paints a moving picture of the blind admitted to the institutions created for them and of the conditions under which they lived, from the officially-sanctioned beggars of the medieval Quinze-Vingts to the cloth makers of the Institute for Blind Workers. She has also uncovered their fictional counterparts in an impressive array of poems, plays, and novels.The book concludes with Braille, whose invention of writing with raised dots gave blind people around the world definitive access to silent reading and to written communication.

In 1846 a small book entitled "Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell"appeared on the British Literary scene. The three psuedonymous poets, the Bront? sisters went on to unprecedented success with such novels as Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey, and Jane Eyre, all published in the following year.

As children, these English sisters had begun writing poems and stories abotu an imaginary country named Gondal, yet they never sought to publish any of their work until Charlotte's discovery of Emily's more mature poems in the autumn of 1845. Charlotte later recalled: "I accidentally lighted on a MS. volume of verse in my sister Emily's handwriting....I looked it over, amd something more than surprise seized me -- a deep conviction that these were not common effusions, nor at all like the poetry women generally write. I thought them condensed and terse, vigorous and genuine. To my ear they had also a peculiar music -- wild, melancholy, and elevating."

The renowned Hatfield edition of "The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Bront?" includes the poetry that captivated Charlotte Bront? a century and a half ago, a body of work that continues to resonate today. This incomparable volume includes Emily's verse from "Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell" as well as 200 works collected from various manuscript sources after her death in 1848. Some were deited and preserved by Charlotte and Arthur Bell Nichols; still others were discovered years later by Bront? scholars.

Originally released in 1923, Hatfield's collection was the result of a remarkable attempt over twenty years to isolate Emily's poems from her sisters' and to achieve chronological order. Accompanied by an interpretive preface on "The Gondal Story" by Miss Fannie E. Ratchford, author of "The Bront?'s Web of Childhood," the edition is the definitive collection of Emily Bront?'s poetical works.