Rupert Brooke

For example, the 1978 quartet she wrote, the first book is actually Middlemarch rewritten in the middle of the 20th century.

And another book she wrote in 2009, the children's book, has main characters in that one book based on E. Nesbitt, H.G. Wells and D.H. Lawrence and actual appearances from Rupert Brooke, Gus Rodin, George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde, all appearing as themselves.

And she's very literary and she's part of the literary establishment, whatever that is.

But she got six honorary doctorates, four other honorary fellowships.

And pray, what is a man but a topsy-turvy creature, his animal facilities perpetually mounted on his rational, his head where his heels should be, groveling on the earth? And yet, with all his faults, he sets up to be a universal reformer and corrector of abuses." a remover of grievances rakes into every slut's corner of nature bringing hidden corruptions to light and raises a mighty dust where there was none before sharing deeply all the while in the very same pollutions he pretends to sweep away his last days are spent in slavery to women and generally the least deserving till worn to the stumps like his brother's besom he is either kicked out of doors or made use of to kindle flames for others to warm themselves by.

this is a librivox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox dot org recording by peter tomlinson samuel butler has a lot to answer for but for him a modern traveller could spend his time peacefully admiring the scenery instead of feeling himself bound to dog the simple and grotesque of the world for the sake of their too human comments it is his fault if a peasant's naivety has come to outweigh the beauty of rivers and the remarks of clergymen are more than mountains it is very restful to give up all effort at observing human nature and drawing social and political deductions from trifles and to let oneself relapse into wide-mouthed worship of the wonders of nature and this is very easy at niagara niagara means nothing it is not leading anywhere it does not result from anything it throws no light on the effects of protection nor on the facility for divorce in america nor on corruption in public life nor on canadian character nor even on the navy bull it is merely a great deal of water falling over some cliffs but it is very remarkable that the human race apt as a child to destroy what it admires has done its best to surround the falls with every distraction incongruity and vulgarity hotels power houses bridges trams picture postcards sham legends stalls booths rifle galleries and side shows frame them about and there are touts niagara is the central home and breeding place for all the touts of earth there are touts insinuating and touts raucous greasy touts brazen touts and upper-class refined gentlemanly take you by the arm touts touts who intimidate and touts who wheedle professionals amateurs and dilettanti male and female touts who would photograph you with an arm round a young lady against a faked background of the sublimest cataract touts who would bully you into cars charabanks elevators or tunnels or deceive you into a carriage and pair touts who would sell you picture postcards moccasins sham indian beadwork blankets tepees and crockery and touts finally who have no apparent object in the world but just purely simply merely incessantly indefatigably and ineffigably to tout and in the midst of all this overwhelming it all are the falls he who sees them instantly forgets humanity they are not very high but they are overpowering they are divided by an island into two parts the canadian and the american half a mile or so above the falls on either side the waters of the great stream begin to run more swiftly and in confusion it descends with ever-growing speed it begins chattering and leaping breaking into a thousand ripples throwing up joyful fingers of spray sometimes it is divided by islands and rocks sometimes the eye can see nothing but a waste of laughing springing foamy waves turning crossing even seeming to stand for an instant erect but always borne impetuously forward like a crowd of triumphant feasters sit close down by it and you see a fragment of the torrent against the sky mottled steely and foaming leaping onward in far-flung criss-cross strands of water perpetually the eye is on the point of descrying a pattern in this weaving and perpetually it is cheated by change in one place part of the flood plunges over a ledge a few feet high and a quarter of a mile or so long in a uniform and stable curve it gives an impression of almost military concerted movement grown suddenly out of confusion but it is swiftly lost again in the multitudinous tossing merriment here and there a rock close to the surface is marked by a white wave that faces backwards and seems to be rushing madly upstream but is really stationary in the headlong charge but for these signs of reluctance the waters seem to fling themselves on with some foreknowledge of their fate in an ever wilder frenzy but it is no maeterlinckian prescience they prove rather that greek belief that the great crashes are preceded by a louder merriment and a wilder gaiety leaping in the sunlight careless entwining clamorously joyful the waves riot on towards the verge but there they change as they turn to the sheer descent the white and blue and slate colour in the heart of the canadian falls at least blend and deepen to a rich wonderful luminous green on the edge of disaster the river seems to gather herself to pause to lift a head noble in ruin and then with a slow grandeur to plunge into the eternal thunder and white chaos below where the stream runs shallower it is a kind of violet color but both violet and green fray and frill to white as they fall the mass of water striking some ever-hidden base of rock leaps up the whole two hundred feet again in pinnacles and domes of spray the spray falls back into the lower river once more all but a little that fines to foam and white mist which drifts in layers along the air graining it and wanders out on the wind over the trees and gardens and houses and so vanishes the manager of one of the great power stations on the banks of the river above the falls told me that the centre of the river bed at the canadian falls is deep and of a saucer shape so it may be possible to fill this up to a uniform depth and divert a lot of water for the power houses and this he said would supply the need for more power which will certainly soon arise without taking away from the beauty of niagara this is a handsome concession of the utilitarians to ordinary sight-seers yet i doubt if we shall be satisfied the real secret of the beauty and terror of the falls is not their height or width but the feeling of colossal power and of unintelligible disaster caused by the plunge of that vast body of water if that were taken away there would be little visible change but the heart would be gone the american falls do not inspire this feeling in the same way as the canadian it is because they are less in volume and because the water does not fall so much into one place by comparison their beauty is almost delicate and fragile they are extraordinarily level one long curtain of lace-work and woven foam seen from opposite when the sun is on them they are blindingly white and the clouds of spray show dark against them with both falls the colour of the water is the ever-altering wonder greens and blues purples and whites melt into one another fade and come again and change with the changing sun sometimes they are as richly diaphanous as a precious stone and glow from within with a deep inexplicable light sometimes the white intricacies of dropping foam become opaque and creamy and always there are the rainbows if you come suddenly upon the falls from above a great double rainbow very vivid spanning the extent of spray from top to bottom is the first thing you see if you wander along the cliff opposite a bow springs into being in the american falls accompanies you courteously on your walk dwindles and dies as the mist ends and awakens again as you reach the canadian tumult and the bold traveller who attempts the trip under the american falls sees when he dare open his eyes to anything tiny baby rainbows some four or five yards in span leaping from rock to rock among the foam and gambolling beside him barely out of hand's reach as he goes one i saw in that place was a complete circle such as i have never seen before and so near that i could put my foot on it it is a terrifying journey beneath and behind the falls the senses are battered and bewildered by the thunder of the water and the assault of wind and spray or rather the sound is not of falling water but merely of falling a noise of unspecified ruin so if you are close behind the endless clamour the sight cannot recognise liquid in the masses that hurl past you are dimly and pitifully aware that sheets of light and darkness are falling in great curves in front of you dull omnipresent foam washes the face farther away in the roar and hissing clouds of spray seem literally to slide down some invisible plane of air beyond the foot of the falls the river is like a slipping floor of marble green with veins of dirty white made by the scum that was foam it slides very quietly and slowly down for a mile or two suddenly exhausted then it turns to a dull sage green and hurries more swiftly smooth and ominous as the walls of the ravine close in trouble stirs and the waters boil and eddy these are the lower rapids a sight more terrifying than the falls because less intelligible close in its bands of rock the river surges tumultuously forward writhing and leaping as if inspired by a demon it is pressed by the straits into a visibly convex form great plains of water slide past sometimes it is thrown up into a pinnacle of foam higher than a house or leaps with incredible speed from the crest of one vast wave to another along the shining curve between like the spring of a wild beast its motion continually suggests muscular action the power manifest in these raphids moves one with a different sense of awe and terror from that of the falls here the inhuman life and strength are spontaneous active almost resolute masculine vigour compared with the passive gigantic power female helpless and overwhelming of the falls a place of fear one is drawn back strangely to a contemplation of the falls at every hour and especially by night when the cloud of spray becomes an immense visible ghost straining and wavering high above the river white and pathetic and translucent the victorian lies very close below the surface in every man there one can sit and let great cloudy thoughts of destiny and the passage of empires drift through the mind for such dreams are at home by niagara i could not get out of my mind the thought of a friend who said that the rainbows over the falls were like the arts and beauty and goodness with regard to the stream of life caused by it thrown upon its spray but unable to stay or direct or affect it and ceasing when it ceased in all comparisons that rise in the heart the river with its multitudinous waves and its single current likens itself to a life whether of an individual or of a community a man's life is of many flashing moments and yet one stream a nation's flows through all its citizens and yet it is more than they in such places one is aware with an almost insupportable and yet comforting certitude that both men and nations are hurried onwards to their ruin or ending as inevitably as this dark flood some go down to it unreluctant and meet it like the river not without nobility and as incessant as inevitable and as unavailing as the spray that hangs over the falls is the white cloud of human crying with some such thoughts does the platitudinous heart win from the confusion and thunder of a niagara peace that the quietest plains or most stable hills can never give End of Niagara Falls by Rupert Brooke Recording by Peter Tomlinson

Nikola Tesla the Man by Hugo Gernsback the door opens and out steps a tall figure over six feet high gaunt but erect it approaches slowly stately you become conscious at once that you are face to face with a personality of a high order nikola tesla advances and shakes your hand with a powerful grip surprising for a man over sixty a winning smile from piercing light blue-gray eyes set in extraordinarily deep sockets fascinates you and makes you feel at once at home you are guided into an office immaculate in its orderliness not a speck of dust is to be seen no papers litter the desk everything is just so it reflects the man himself immaculate in attire orderly and precise in his every movement dressed in a dark frock coat he is entirely devoid of all jewellery no ring stick-pin or even watch-chain can be seen tesla speaks a very high and almost falsetto voice he speaks quickly and very convincingly it is the man's voice chiefly which fascinates you as he speaks you find it difficult to take your eyes off his own only when he speaks to others do you have the chance to study his head predominant of which is a very high forehead with a bulge between the eyes the never-failing sign of an exceptional intelligence then the long well-shaped nose proclaiming the scientist how does this man who has accomplished such a tremendous work keep young and manage to surprise the world with more and more inventions as he grows older how does this youth of sixty who is a professor of mathematics a great mechanical and electrical engineer and the greatest inventor of all times keep his physical as well as remarkable mental freshness to begin with tesla who is by birth a serbian comes from a long-lived hardy race his family tree abounds with centenarians accordingly tesla barring accidents fully expects to be still inventing in a d nineteen sixty but the chief reason for his perpetual youth is found in his gastronomical frugality tesla has learned the great fundamental truth that most people not only eat all of their bodily ills but actually eat themselves to death by either eating too much or else by food that does not agree with them when tesla found out that tobacco and black coffee interfered with his physical well-being he quit both this is the simple daily menu of the great inventor breakfast one or two pints of warm milk and a few eggs prepared by himself yes he is a bachelor lunch none whatsoever as a rule dinner celery or the like soup a single piece of meat or fowl potatoes and one other vegetable a glass of light wine for dessert perhaps a slice of cheese and invariably a big raw apple and that's all tesla is very fussy and particular about his food he eats very little but what he does eat must be of the very best and he knows for outside of being a great inventor in science he is an accomplished cook who has invented all sorts of savoury dishes his only voice is his generosity the man who by the ignorant onlooker has often been called an idle dreamer has made over a million dollars out of his inventions and spend them as quickly on new ones but tesla is an idealist of the highest order and to such men money itself means but little nikola tesla the man by hugo

THE ACTUAL HEIGHT OF SEA WAVES average in different oceans fifty two feet the height of the tallest billow yet measured not more than thirty feet in north atlantic waves are the agents of tremendous force as the batterings received by the big ocean liners in the winter storms tend to prove but in spite of the stories told by timid or imaginative passengers on the europe america ferry the surges of the north atlantic are not the highest waves nor the most forcible the most tremendous of seas are those that form south of the cape of good hope and cape horn where the oceanic belt is unbroken by land how high those southern waves rise has not been accurately measured so far as can be discovered but probably they are not very much higher than the waves farther north says the new york sun sailors in modern times have never seen such waves as those which the early navigators declared attained heights of one hundred to one hundred and thirty feet la perouse asserted that he saw waves towering in the pacific to a height of nearly two hundred feet in these more scientific days we may say that the highest wave yet measured had an altitude of about fifty-two feet this was in the southern ocean a little north of the antarctic regions and it is quite certain that the highest waves ever seen in that region did not surpass fifty eight feet in altitude a wave of that height would certainly be a formidable looking object and its crest would wash the windows of the fifth story of many new york buildings The average height of the waves in different oceans has been ascertained with some approach to accuracy as the result of a great many measurements.

The two windows in the room both faced north, but it was a cheerful and a pleasant place, and owing partly to the light colour of the walls and partly to the affection which was lavished upon it, it did not possess that cave-like atmosphere peculiar to rooms never visited by the sun.

It overlooked the whole of the waste, and this, combined with the chastity of its appearance, led one to believe that Carrington was indeed Cambridge, and that not far off the river of Byron and Rupert Brook wound under the smelly woods of Grandchester, and wandered away past the drooping willows of King's College under Clare Bridge and out into the lonely fens of the Isle of Ely.

After reading for about ten minutes Sebastian Hunt let the book fall from his hand, for his eyes were tired with work, and his senses were exhausted by the war which seemed to-day to drag his heart and mind out of him, and he could no longer see nor understand the words.

To-night he was going down to his old cottage at East Newton under the Downs, where he was to remain for full six days.

I am twenty-seven.

Perhaps I am too old.

Perhaps what Rupert Brooke said of himself is true for me.

I can't really love wholeheartedly.