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All free summaries — page 398
34,093 public-domain books, summarised. Page 398 of 711.
Essays on things
William Lyon Phelps
Observations on the mundane and the magnificent often reveal more about the human condition than formal philosophy. A seasoned observer finds the pulse of life in everything from morning coffee to the mystery of the skylark.
Gambia
Frederick John Melville
HOOK A guide to the delicate art of collecting Gambian postage, this work examines the evolution of the colony's stamp issues from the inaugural 1869 cameo series to the emergency provisionals of the early twentieth century.
George Selwyn
George Augustus Selwyn
This volume offers an intimate, unguarded glimpse into the private life and social sphere of a legendary eighteenth-century wit. Through his own letters, a man once defined by public reputation reveals a surprisingly tender, deeply domestic, and observant human heart.
Half Hours With Modern Scientists: Lectures and Essays
John Tyndall
This collection of lectures and essays serves as a window into the intellectual fermentation of the nineteenth century, capturing the moment when the physical sciences began to fundamentally reshape humanity’s understanding of its own origins and nature.
Harlem shadows
Claude McKay
The poems within these pages are an urgent, unflinching cry against systemic cruelty and a deeply personal testament to the ache of displacement. They capture the spirit of a writer caught between the vibrant, sun-drenched memory of the Caribbean and the cold, often hostile, reality of American city life.
Holiday Romance
Charles Dickens
This collection of four interconnected tales offers a playful, satirical subversion of Victorian family life, told entirely from the perspective of children who are mimicking—and mocking—the world of their elders. It is a whimsical experiment in role-reversal that delights in the absurdity of adult social conventions.
"I Believe" and other essays
Guy Thorne
A collection of Edwardian essays that critiques modern society through a fiercely orthodox lens. These polemics challenge the reader to reconcile their personal conduct with the demands of Christian faith and traditional duty.
In a Glass Darkly, v. 2/3
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
The seductive charm of a mysterious woman and the dark allure of a forgotten château lead an unsuspecting traveler into a web of lethal deception.
In Search of El Dorado: A Wanderer's Experiences
Alexander MacDonald
A restless traveler recounts his life-altering pursuit of wealth across the frozen Klondike and the brutal Australian outback, where gold is often found only at the edge of ruin.
Ireland and the Home Rule Movement
McDonnell, Michael, Sir
This scholarly examination dissects the structural failures of British governance in Ireland, arguing that systemic ignorance and economic inequality fueled the enduring struggle for national autonomy.
King Lear
William Shakespeare
HOOK An aging king foolishly divides his realm among his daughters, triggering a descent into madness and a brutal, sweeping collapse of his family and state.
Laboratory Manual of Glass-Blowing
Francis C. (Francis Cowles) Frary
Mastering the flame requires equal parts patience, steady hands, and a deep, intuitive understanding of how glass behaves under pressure and heat.
Legends of the Saxon Saints
Aubrey De Vere
These verses weave the ancient history of England’s conversion into a tapestry of mythic wonder and spiritual devotion. They capture the transition from the old gods of the North to the dawn of the Christian era.
Lizzy Glenn
T. S. (Timothy Shay) Arthur
Hard work alone cannot protect a family from the grinding machinery of an unforgiving economy. This narrative exposes the fragility of life for the urban poor in nineteenth-century Philadelphia.
Manual of the Mother Church: The First Church of Christ Scientist in Boston, Massachusetts
Mary Baker Eddy
This essential regulatory document serves as the governing constitution for The First Church of Christ, Scientist. It codifies the administrative, spiritual, and disciplinary framework required to maintain the unity and integrity of the global movement.
Maps of Old London
Unknown
The evolution of a world capital is captured here, tracing London from its early panoramic depictions through its total transformation by fire and into the sprawling, recognizable metropolis of the eighteenth century.
Mark Hurdlestone
Susanna Moodie
A miser’s legacy of greed and cruelty poisons the lives of his two nephews, setting them on divergent paths of virtue and vice. This Victorian moral drama explores how the corrosive power of wealth distorts the human spirit.
Men, Women and Guns
H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
This collection of interconnected tales captures the raw, disorienting experience of the Great War, blending the camaraderie of the front lines with the jarring, surreal shifts of returning to civilian life. It is a work of immediate, visceral observation from the trenches of the Ypres salient.
More Fables
George Ade
This collection of satirical vignettes serves as a sharp, unsentimental mirror held up to the absurdities of American social life at the turn of the twentieth century. It offers a series of cautionary tales where the moral is often less about virtue and more about the inevitable cost of pretense.
Mrs. Bindle: Some Incidents from the Domestic Life of the Bindles
Herbert George Jenkins
In this observant portrait of a marriage, a sharp-tongued, socially ambitious woman clashes with her husband’s easygoing nature, proving that domestic peace is a hard-won, fleeting victory.
Niebuhr's lectures on Roman history, Vol. 2 (of 3)
Barthold Georg Niebuhr
The relentless rise of Rome and the methodical dismantling of Carthage define an era of iron-willed expansion and shifting political morality. These lectures capture the transformation of a city-state into a Mediterranean hegemon.
Of Ghostes and Spirites, Walking by Night: And of Straunge Noyses, Crackes, and Sundrie Forewarnings, Which Commonly Happen Before the Death of Men: Great Slaughters, and Alterations of Kingdoms
Ludwig Lavater
Whether spirits are spectral remnants of the dead or merely deceptions of the senses, they demand not our fear, but our vigilance against superstition. This inquiry serves as a reasoned defense of the rational mind against the creeping shadows of supernatural dread.
Our Little Danish Cousin
Luna May Ennis
This gentle travelogue follows a young American visitor and his Danish relatives as they discover the history, legends, and enduring traditions of the "Land of dark woods.
Outline Studies in the New Testament for Bible Teachers
Jesse Lyman Hurlbut
This instructional manual provides a structured map for Bible teachers to guide students through the complex geography, chronological events, and historical evolution of the New Testament.
Plays
John Galsworthy
Galsworthy’s dramatic works capture the quiet, crushing collisions of conscience and class in early twentieth-century England. These plays present social conflict not as a clash of villains, but as an inevitable grinding of gears between people who refuse to yield.
Poems of reflection
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
This collection of verse captures the Victorian and early twentieth-century American spirit, navigating the heavy currents of grief, domestic piety, and moral reform with earnest, rhythmic sincerity. It is a work of heartfelt observation, speaking directly to the ordinary burdens of the soul.
Poison: A Farce
George M. (George Melville) Baker
** A wealthy, anxious sugar merchant discovers he may have poisoned thousands of people, sparking a frantic comedy of errors involving fake funerals, desperate suitors, and an unwanted houseguest.
Railway Rates: English and Foreign
James Grierson
The complex world of 19th-century logistics comes alive in this clear-eyed defense of the railway industry. It offers a practical look at how freight charges were determined during a time of immense economic transformation.
Rhymes Old and New
Unknown
A century-old treasury of verses, this collection gathers the echoes of nursery lore, weather wisdom, and childhood games that have shaped the English imagination for generations.
Rosa Alchemica
W. B. (William Butler) Yeats
An aging aesthete, obsessed with the cold beauty of art, is lured away from his solitary, curated life by an old acquaintance promising a transcendental initiation into a secret order. This encounter shatters the narrator’s carefully constructed world, forcing a violent collision between the refined, lonely…
Say and Seal, Volume I
Susan Warner
In a quiet New England town, a new teacher arrives, sparking a delicate dance of faith, duty, and courtship that centers on his quiet, transformative influence over his students and a young woman named Faith.
Scribner's Magazine, Volume 26, October 1899
Various
This collection captures the restless, expansive spirit of the late nineteenth century through a blend of travel narrative, theatrical memoir, and reflective prose. It serves as a vivid time capsule of a world in transition.
Studies from Court and Cloister: being essays, historical and literary dealing mainly with subjects relating to the XVIth and XVIIth centuries
J. M. (Jean Mary) Stone
This collection of historical and literary essays offers a meticulous, scholarly window into the religious and political upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. With a clear focus on the shifting landscape of faith, it challenges long-held narratives regarding the Reformation in England and abroad.
The American Judiciary
Simeon E. (Simeon Eben) Baldwin
The American judiciary stands as a unique bulwark of constitutional power, where judges are uniquely tasked with weighing legislative acts against the supreme, enduring mandate of the people.
The Ball at Sceaux
Honoré de Balzac
The pride of a young woman’s aristocratic birth collides with the shifting social landscape of post-Revolutionary France. Her obsession with rank and appearance becomes the very instrument of her undoing.
The Blindman's World: 1898
Edward Bellamy
The stars hold a mirror to humanity in this haunting exploration of a world where the future is as visible as the past. A professor’s accidental journey through space exposes the profound, tragic fragility of the human condition.
The Burglars' Club: A Romance in Twelve Chronicles
Henry Augustus Hering
The idle rich often hunger for danger, leading a group of bored aristocrats to turn their lives into a high-stakes game of larceny and nerve.
The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
This pioneering autobiography offers a startlingly candid portrait of an Enlightenment thinker’s inner life, tracing the development of a sensitive, complicated spirit from his wandering youth to his eventual literary success.
The Count's Chauffeur
William Le Queux
The life of a high-speed criminal is lived in the rearview mirror, where every winding European road promises either a fortune or a prison cell. This collection of linked tales follows a master driver navigating the dangerous slipstream of an international jewel thief.
The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915
Basil L. (Basil Lanneau) Gildersleeve
The memories of a lost cause endure as a poignant, haunting testament to the convictions of a generation that saw its world dismantled and its allegiances redefined by war.
The Expositor's Bible: The Second Book of Samuel
William Garden Blaikie
A profound meditation on the complexities of power, divine favor, and the moral fragility of a legendary king, this volume offers a bridge between ancient scripture and the Victorian theological imagination.
The Fight for the Republic in China
B. L. (Bertram Lenox) Putnam Weale
The survival of a fragile Republic depends on its internal strength, yet foreign ambitions and the weight of imperial history constantly threaten to dismantle the newborn state.
The Fool: A Play in Four Acts
Channing Pollock
The story of a man who attempts to live by the literal teachings of Christ in modern New York, this play explores the friction between spiritual ideals and the cold realities of industrial capitalism. It is a work that asks, with quiet intensity, what would happen if a man actually tried to live like the Master.
The Frontier
Maurice Leblanc
The shadow of an encroaching war looms over a quiet, fortified household, forcing a scholar to choose between his pacifist ideals and the visceral reality of his homeland’s defense. This tense, atmospheric drama examines how abstract principles fracture under the weight of an inevitable national crisis.
The Grip of Desire: The Story of a Parish-Priest
Hector France
This narrative follows the internal and external disintegration of a village priest, exploring the friction between his religious vows and his human nature. It is a work of grim realism that prioritizes the visceral truth of the body over the ideals of the pulpit.
The Hero
Elaine Wilber
This story follows a crew of soldiers whose mission to occupy a seemingly primitive planet takes an unexpected turn when their own arrogance blinds them to the true nature of the inhabitants.
The Historical Growth of the English Parish Church
A. Hamilton (Alexander Hamilton) Thompson
The ancient stones of the English parish church tell a story not of grand monastic decree, but of local pride, changing rituals, and the quiet, persistent labor of common people.
The Iron Game: A Tale of the War
Henry F. (Henry Francis) Keenan
The "iron game" of the American Civil War serves as the backdrop for a tale of love, duty, and the tragic ironies that bind families across battle lines.