LitHits

From the dedication to Stevenson’s friend, ‘My Dear Sidney Colvin’. The journey which this little book is to describe was very agreeable and fortunate for me. After an uncouth beginning, I had the best of luck to the end. But we are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of this world—all, too, travellers with a donkey: and the best that we find in our travels is an honest friend. He is a fortunate voyager who finds many. We travel, indeed, to find them.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published Soon as the sun forsook the eastern main The pealing thunder shook the heav'nly plain; Majestic grandeur! From the zephyr's wing, Exhales the incense of the blooming spring. Soft purl the streams, the birds renew their notes, And through the air their mingled music floats.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published What can be said in New Year rhymes, That’s not been said a thousand times? The new years come, the old years go, We know we dream, we dream we know. We rise up laughing with the light, We lie down weeping with the night. We hug the world until it stings, We curse it then and sigh for wings. We live, we love, we woo, we wed, We wreathe our prides, we sheet our dead.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published But most by Numbers judge a Poet’s Song, And smooth or rough, with them, is right or wrong; In the bright Muse tho’ thousand Charms conspire, Her Voice is all these tuneful Fools admire, Who haunt Parnassus but to please their Ear, Not mend their Minds; as some to Church repair, Not for the Doctrine, but the Musick there.

Captain Wentworth and Anne Elliot were in love eight years ago, but she was wrongly dissuaded from marrying him due to her family’s snobbery. The pair have met again in Bath by accident, rekindling old flames, yet neither is sure of how the other feels. Finally, Captain Wentworth pours forth his love for Anne in a letter.

The miserly Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come—who aim to transform his parsimonious qualities to those more appropriate to the season: kindness, generosity, and selflessness. In this scene, the Ghost of Christmas Present has fantastically whisked Scrooge away to observe the celebrations of his underpaid employee, Bob Cratchit.

Her greatness was an accepted fact. Her fame had not been a dashing offensive but an inevitable advance quietly over-running the world. People who never read knew her name as well as Napoleon's. There was, somehow, something a little irreverent about being her contemporary. To attend the birth of so many masterpieces gave you the feeling of a legendary past invading the present.

A horse trainer named John Straker, in charge of the famous race-horse Silver Blaze, has been killed and Sherlock Holmes is on the case. He and his assistant, Dr Watson, have come to Dartmoor to investigate the murder. As they talk with the impatient Colonel Ross, Silver Blaze’s owner, and the local police Inspector, they notice something strange about the behaviour of the other animals at the scene of the crime… “My friend and I return to town by the night-express,” said Holmes.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published A place named for nothing, a nothing, a space in a spine of hills, a great scoop of sky in a green spoon, a doorway from east to west. A place with a past before history started. Think the river back, the giant whose bed you stand in. It would run where the skuas* balance between two hills, where air pours in place of water. Something was here, now nothing is.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood; Blue with all malice, like a madman's flash; And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh. Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-leads, Which long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads, Or give him cartridges of fine zinc teeth Sharp with the sharpness of grief and death. For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple.