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Showing 1 - 25 of
175 matches in All Departments
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Italian Journeys
W.D. Howells
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R2,113
R2,006
Discovery Miles 20 060
Save R107 (5%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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The young actor who thought he saw his part in Maxwell's play had
so far made his way upward on the Pacific Coast that he felt
justified in taking the road with a combination of his own. He met
the author at a dinner of the Papyrus Club in Boston, where they
were introduced with a facile flourish of praise from the
journalist who brought them together, as the very men who were
looking for each other, and who ought to be able to give the
American public a real American drama. The actor, who believed he
had an ideal of this drama, professed an immediate interest in the
kind of thing Maxwell told him he was trying to do, and asked him
to come the next day, if he did not mind its being Sunday, and talk
the play over with him. He was at breakfast when Maxwell came, at
about the hour people were getting home from church, and he asked
the author to join him. But Maxwell had already breakfasted, and he
hid his impatience of the actor's politeness as well as he could,
and began at the first moment possible: "The idea of my play is
biblical; we're still a very biblical people." He had thought of
the fact in seeing so many worshippers swarming out of the
churches.
In the best room of a farm-house on the skirts of a village in the
hills of Northern Massachusetts, there sat one morning in August
three people who were not strangers to the house, but who had
apparently assembled in the parlor as the place most in accord with
an unaccustomed finery in their dress. One was an elderly woman
with a plain, honest face, as kindly in expression as she could be
perfectly sure she felt, and no more; she rocked herself softly in
the haircloth arm-chair, and addressed as father the old man who
sat at one end of the table between the windows, and drubbed
noiselessly upon it with his stubbed fingers, while his lips,
puckered to a whistle, emitted no sound. His face had that
distinctly fresh-shaven effect which once a week is the advantage
of shaving no oftener: here and there, in the deeper wrinkles, a
frosty stubble had escaped the razor. He wore an old-fashioned, low
black satin stock, over the top of which the linen of his
unstarched collar contrived with difficulty to make itself seen;
his high-crowned, lead-colored straw hat lay on the table before
him. At the other end of the table sat a young girl, who leaned
upon it with one arm, propping her averted face on her hand. The
window was open beside her, and she was staring out upon the
door-yard, where the hens were burrowing for coolness in the soft
earth under the lilac bushes; from time to time she put her
handkerchief to her eyes.
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Suburban Sketches (Hardcover)
Howells W. D. Howells, W.D. Howells; Edited by 1stworld Library
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R595
Discovery Miles 5 950
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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It was on a morning of the lovely New England May that we left the
horse-car, and, spreading our umbrellas, walked down the street to
our new home in Charlesbridge, through a storm of snow and rain so
finely blent by the influences of this fortunate climate, that no
flake knew itself from its sister drop, or could be better
identified by the people against whom they beat in unison. A vernal
gale from the east fanned our cheeks and pierced our marrow and
chilled our blood, while the raw, cold green of the adventurous
grass on the borders of the sopping sidewalks gave, as it peered
through its veil of melting snow and freezing rain, a peculiar
cheerfulness to the landscape. Here and there in the vacant lots
abandoned hoop-skirts defied decay; and near the half-finished
wooden houses, empty mortar-beds, and bits of lath and slate strewn
over the scarred and mutilated ground, added their interest to the
scene. A shaggy drift hung upon the trees before our own house
(which had been built some years earlier), while its swollen eaves
wept silently and incessantly upon the embankments lifting its base
several feet above the common level.
No drop-curtain, at any theatre I have seen, was ever so richly
imagined, with misty tops and shadowy clefts and frowning cliffs
and gloomy valleys and long, plunging cataracts, as the actual
landscape of Madeira, when we drew nearer and nearer to it, at the
close of a tearful afternoon of mid-January. The scenery of
drop-curtains is often very holdly beautiful, but here Nature, if
she had taken a hint from art, had certainly bettered her
instruction. During the waits between acts at the theatre, while
studying the magnificent painting beyond the trouble of the
orchestra, I have been most impressed by the splendid variety which
the artist had got into his picture, where the spacious frame lent
itself to his passion for saying everything; but I remembered his
thronging fancies as meagre and scanty in the presence of the
stupendous reality before me. I have, for instance, not even
mentioned the sea, which swept smoother and smoother in toward the
feet of those precipices and grew more and more trans-lucently
purple and yellow and green, while half a score of cascades shot
straight down their fronts in shafts of snowy foam, and over their
pachydermatous shoulders streamed and hung long reaches of gray
vines or mosses.
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London Films (Hardcover)
Howells W. D. Howells, W.D. Howells; Edited by 1stworld Library
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R598
Discovery Miles 5 980
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Whoever carries a mental kodak with him (as I suspect I was in the
habit of doing long before I knew it) must be aware of the
uncertain value of the different exposures. This can be determined
only by the process of developing, which requires a dark room and
other apparatus not always at hand; and so much depends upon the
process that it might be well if it could always be left to some
one who makes a specialty of it, as in the case of the real amateur
photographer. Then one's faulty impressions might be so treated as
to yield a pictorial result of interest, or frankly thrown away if
they showed hopeless to the instructed eye. Otherwise, one must do
one's own developing, and trust the result, whatever it is, to the
imaginative kindness of the reader, who will surely, if he is the
right sort of reader, be able to sharpen the blurred details, to
soften the harsh lights, and blend the shadows in a subordination
giving due relief to the best meaning of the print. This is what I
fancy myself to be doing now, and if any one shall say that my
little pictures are superficial, I shall not be able to gainsay
him. I can only answer that most pictures represent the surfaces of
things;
I confess that with all my curiosity to meet an Altrurian, I was in
no hospitable mood toward the traveler when he finally presented
himself, pursuant to the letter of advice sent me by the friend who
introduced him. It would be easy enough to take care of him in the
hotel; I had merely to engage a room for him, and have the clerk
tell him his money was not good if he tried to pay for anything.
But I had swung fairly into my story; its people were about me all
the time; I dwelt amid its events and places, and I did not see how
I could welcome my guest among them, or abandon them for him.
Still, when he actually arrived, and I took his hand as he stepped
from the train, I found it less difficult to say that I was glad to
see him than I expected. In fact, I was glad, for I could not look
upon his face without feeling a glow of kindness for him. I had not
the least trouble in identifying him, for he was so unlike all the
Americans who dismounted from the train with him, and who all
looked hot, worried, and anxious. He was a man no longer young, but
in what we call the heyday of life, when our own people are so
absorbed in making provision for the future that they may be said
not to live in the present at all.
As Don Ippolito passed down the long narrow calle or footway
leading from the Campo San Stefano to the Grand Canal in Venice, he
peered anxiously about him: now turning for a backward look up the
calle, where there was no living thing in sight but a cat on a
garden gate; now running a quick eye along the palace walls that
rose vast on either hand and notched the slender strip of blue sky
visible overhead with the lines of their jutting balconies,
chimneys, and cornices; and now glancing toward the canal, where he
could see the noiseless black boats meeting and passing. There was
no sound in the calle save his own footfalls and the harsh scream
of a parrot that hung in the sunshine in one of the loftiest
windows; but the note of a peasant crying pots of pinks and roses
in the campo came softened to Don Ippolito's sense, and he heard
the gondoliers as they hoarsely jested together and gossiped, with
the canal between them, at the next gondola station. The first
tenderness of spring was in the air though down in that calle there
was yet enough of the wintry rawness to chill the tip of Don
Ippolito's sensitive nose, which he rubbed for comfort with a
handkerchief of dark blue calico, and polished for ornament with a
handkerchief of white linen.
If there was any fellow in the Boy's Town fifty years ago who had a
good reason to run off it was Pony Baker. Pony was not his real
name; it was what the boys called him, because there were so many
fellows who had to be told apart, as Big Joe and Little Joe, and
Big John and Little John, and Big Bill and Little Bill, that they
got tired of telling boys apart that way; and after one of the boys
called him Pony Baker, so that you could know him from his cousin
Frank Baker, nobody ever called him anything else. You would have
known Pony from the other Frank Baker, anyway, if you had seen them
together, for the other Frank Baker was a tall, lank, tow-headed
boy, with a face so full of freckles that you could not have put a
pin-point between them, and large, bony hands that came a long way
out of his coat-sleeves; and the Frank Baker that I mean here was
little and dark and round, with a thick crop of black hair on his
nice head; and he had black eyes, and a smooth, swarthy face,
without a freckle on it. He was pretty well dressed in clothes that
fitted him, and his hands were small and plump.
Why should the proud stomach of American travel, much tossed in the
transatlantic voyage, so instantly have itself carried from
Liverpool to any point where trains will convey it? Liverpool is
most worthy to be seen and known, and no one who looks up from the
bacon and eggs of his first hotel breakfast after landing, and
finds himself confronted by the coal-smoked Greek architecture of
St. George's Hall, can deny that it is of a singularly noble
presence. The city has moments of failing in the promise of this
classic edifice, but every now and then it reverts to it, and
reminds the traveller that he is in a great modern metropolis of
commerce by many other noble edifices.
Travelogues Collection offers readers a unique glimpse into the
diverse landscape, culture and wildlife of the world from the
perspective of late 19th and early 20th century esteemed travelers.
From the exotic islands of Fiji to the lush jungles of Africa to
the bustling streets of New York City, these picturesque backdrops
set the scene for amusing, and at times prejudiced, anecdotes of
adventure, survival and camaraderie. Photographs and whimsical
illustrations complement the descriptive text, bringing to life the
colorful characters encountered along the way. The Shelf2Life
Travelogues Collection allows readers to embark on a voyage into
the past to experience the world as it once was and meet the people
who inhabited it.
Midway of the Ponte Vecchio at Florence, where three arches break
the lines of the little jewellers' booths glittering on either
hand, and open an approach to the parapet, Colville lounged against
the corner of a shop and stared out upon the river. It was
Matthew Lanfear had stopped off, between Genoa and Nice, at San
Remo in the interest of a friend who had come over on the steamer
with him, and who wished him to test the air before settling there
for the winter with an invalid wife. She was one of those
On the forward promenade of the Saguenay boat which had been
advertised to leave Quebec at seven o'clock on Tuesday morning,
Miss Kitty Ellison sat tranquilly expectant of the joys which its
departure should bring, and tolerantly patient of its delay; for
After the death of Judge Kilburn his daughter came back to America.
They had been eleven winters in Rome, always meaning to return, but
staying on from year to year, as people do who have nothing
definite to call them home. Toward the last Miss Kilburn ta
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South-Sea Idyls (Paperback)
Charles Warren Stoddard; Introduction by W.D. Howells
bundle available
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R537
Discovery Miles 5 370
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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A pioneering California writer, Charles Warren Stoddard (1843-1909)
is best known for his homoerotic tales collected as South-Sea Idyls
and The Island of Tranquil Delights. Stoddard was a member of San
Francisco's Bohemian and journalistic circles, where he was
appreciated for his wit. His literary friendships and lasting
relationships included Ambrose Bierce, Ina Coolbrith, Bret Harte,
Robert Louis Stevenson, W. D. Howells, Henry Adams, Joaquin Miller,
Jack London, George Sterling, Bliss Carman, Yone Noguchi, George
Cabot Lodge, and Samuel Clemens.
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Italian Journeys
W.D. Howells
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R1,560
Discovery Miles 15 600
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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