The fine wooden panels of the vaulted library are kept well-dusted. A soft red carpeting covers the floor and caresses your bare feet, and you notice that each book has been placed neatly in its shelf with tender care.

My Scribe often consults the following pages when he just can't find that quote he's thinking of. Thankfully, the Web is full of sites dedicated to authors and their works.

[Sappho]
Sappho
Even your garment plunders my eyes.
I am enchanted: I who once
Complained to the Cyprus-born goddess,
Whom I now beseech
Never to let this lose me grace
But rather bring you back to me:
Amongst all mortal women the one
I most wish to see.
Homer
How happy Priam and his sons would be
And all the Trojans wild with joy, if they
Got wind of all these words between you!
- The Iliad

Homer
[Virgil]
Virgil
I only ask
for empty time, a rest and truce for all
this frenzy, until fortune teaches me
defeated, how to sorrow.
- The Aeneid
Edmund Spenser: Poems
For since mine eye your joyous sight did mis,
My chearefull day is turnd to chearelesse night,
And eke my night of death the shadow is,
But welcome now my light, and shining lampe of blis.
- The Faerie Queene
[Spenser]
[Marlowe]
Christopher Marlowe
Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it:
Thinkest thou that I who saw the face of God
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
In being deprived of everlasting bliss?
- Doctor Faustus
The Shakespeare Homepage
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear.
- A Midsummer Night's Dream
[Shakespeare]
[Milton]
John Milton: Selected Poetry
But O, as to embrace me she inclin'd,
I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night.
- Methought I Saw...
William Blake: Selected Poems
And the gates of this Chapel were shut
And "Thou shalt not" writ over the door...
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.
- The Garden of Love
[Blake]
[Wordsworth]
William Wordsworth: Complete Poems
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:...
- Ode on Intimations of Immortality
John Keats: Poems
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music: - Do I wake or sleep?
- Ode to a Nightingale
[Keats]
[Shelley]
Percy Bysshe Shelley: Complete Poems
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
- Ode to the West Wind
Lord Byron: Selected Poems
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet her in her aspect and her eyes...
[Byron]
[Poe]
Poetry by Edgar Allan Poe
From childhood's hour I have not seen
As others were...
- Alone
Walt Whitman Page
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won:
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
- O Captain! My Captain!
[Whitman]
[Tennyson]
Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Selected Poems
But Lancelot mused a little space;
He said, "She has a lovely face;
God in his mercy lend her grace,
The Lady of Shalott."
Robert Browning: Selected Poems
Take back the hope you gave - I claim
Only a memory of the same,
- And this beside, if you will not blame,
You leave for one more last ride with me.
- The Last Ride Together
[Browning]
[Elizabeth B. Browning]
Selected Poetry of Elizabeth B. Browning
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,--I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life !--and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
- Sonnets from the Portuguese
William Butler Yeats
The host is riding from Knocknarea
And over the grave of Clooth-na-Bare;
Caoilte tossing his burning hair,
And Niamh calling "Away, come away:
Empty your heart of its mortal dream..."
- The Hosting of the Sidhe
[Yeats]
[Tolkien]
Tolkien Poems Page
Softly in the gloom they heard the birds
Singing afar in Nargothrond,
The sighing of the sea beyond,
Beyond the western world, on sand
On sand of pearls in Elvenland.
- The Silmarillion

[King]Martin Luther King, Jr. "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." The greatest hero of Twentieth Century America, Dr. King was the single man most responsible for bringing about the end of segregation. His writings point the way to the end of injustice and racism in the world. Highly recommended are the Letter from Birmingham Jail and the I Have a Dream speech. "One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law."

[Lincoln]Abraham Lincoln Online "We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature." The sixteenth and greatest President of the United States, Lincoln's assassination shattered his vision of reconciling Northern and Southern states and American citizens of all skin colors.

[Gandhi]Mohandas "Mahatma" Gandhi "Anger and intolerance are the enemies of correct understanding." Gandhi was a leader of the Indian independence movement and is the father of modern India. His insistence on nonviolent direct action has inspired activists the world over.

[Holmes+Watson]Sherlock Holmes "For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as a great brain." - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Three Garridebs.

[Thoreau]Henry David Thoreau "Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?" The Eighteenth Century American philosopher's works include Walden and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.

[Kennealy]Patricia Kennealy-Morrison was the author of the brilliant Keltiad series, of which there are two trilogies and two stand-alone novels. Kennealy was the greatest unsung voice of modern fantasy. Her characters are well-defined and develop marvelously through her chronicles. In her books she created a culture marvelously blending technology and magic.

Civil Rights Leaders include Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, and many others.

Native American Leaders include Chief Joseph, Chief Seattle, Crazy Horse, Geronimo, Sequoiah, Sitting Bull, Tecumseh, and many others.

Among my favorite authors are Isaac Asimov, Nick Bantock, e.e. cummings, Alexandre Dumas, Erasmus, Diana Gabaldon, Henrik Ibsen, Mercedes Lackey, Anne McCaffrey, Patrick F. McManus, Naomi Novik, Diana L. Paxson, Kat Richardson, and Christopher Stasheff. My favorite children's authors include Lloyd Alexander, Susan Cooper, C.S. Lewis, and J. K. Rowling.


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