The following book consists of brief biographical commentaries about Beethoven, each followed by sections of quotations attributed to the muse.

Oscar Wilde's play An Ideal Husband is a comedy about politics, blackmail and corruption.

Arms and the Man was George Bernard Shaw's first commercially successful play.

Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Causing mass hysteria as listeners of its 1938 radio broadcast believed a Martian invasion of Earth really was taking place, H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds is perhaps the most famous novel of its genre.

Jane Eyre is raised in her aunt's house after the death of her parents.

The Importance of Being Earnest is the last play Oscar Wilde ever wrote, and remains his most enduringly popular.

A beautiful young man, Dorian Gray, sits for a portrait. In the garden of the artist's house he falls into conversation with Lord Wotton.

A remarkable writer and intellectual in her own right, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley first encountered the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley when she was only a teenager. After fathering three of her children, Shelley drowned during a storm.

This fascinating travelogue details the visit of author Ellen Clacy to the massive gold mines that were erected in Australia in the nineteenth century.

Nations yet to come will look back upon his history as to some grand and supernatural romance.

The Hound of the Baskervilles is a crime novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle starring the great detective of Baker Street, Sherlock Holmes. Wealthy landowner Sir Charles Baskerville is found dead in the parkland surrounding his manor.

Soils and national characters differ; but fairy tales are the same in plot and incidents, if not in treatment.

In America, in 1770, a well-defined aristocracy held control.

The Country of the Blind and Other Stories brings together thirty-three of H. G. Wells' science fiction and fantasy short stories which were previously published separately in a variety of periodicals.

Selecting his cut and uncut jewels from very various Buddhistic sources, Mr. Bowden has here supplied those who buy and use the book with rubies and sapphires and emeralds of wisdom, compassion, and human brotherhood.

There is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown the springs and mechanism of any art.

Sir Joshua Reynolds laid down principles of art from the point of view of a man of genius who had made his power felt, and with the clear good sense which is the foundation of all work that looks upward and may hope to live.

Heidi is a novel for children written in 1880 which remains one of the most well-known pieces of Swiss literature.

It is a curious fact that of that class of literature to which Munchausen belongs, that namely of Voyages Imaginaires, the three great types should have all been created in England.