Reader's companion; a personal anthology selected for re-readability from the writers of 2000 years for the reader of today

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Introduction / Louis Kronenberger

The death of Socrates / Plato

A modest proposal / Jonathan Swift

On the conversation of authors / William Hazlitt

Selections from The life of Johnson / James Boswell

The emperor's new clothes / Hans Christian Andersen

The death of Ivan Ilych / Leo Tolstoy

From the Prologue to the Canterbury tales / Geoffrey Chaucer

I sing of a maiden / Anonymous

Lully, Lully / Anonymous

Sir Patrick Spens / Anonymous

Fair Helen / Anonymous

Lord Randal / Anonymous

The maidens came / Anonymous

Western wind, when wilt thou blow? / Anonymous

With Margerain gentle / John Skelton

O mortal folk, you may behold / Stephen Hawes

Written the night before he was beheaded, 1586 / Chidiock Tichbourne

The lowest trees have tops / Sir Edward Dyer / Tom o' Bedlam's song / Anonymous

Once did I love ... / Anonymous

Full fathom five ... / William Shakespeare

Poor naked wretches ... / William Shakespeare

Cleopatra's death / William Shakespeare

Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing / William Shakespeare

Poor soul, the center of my sinful Earth / William Shakespeare

Hear, ye ladies that despise / John Fletcher

Tell, o tell / Thomas Campion

Now winter nights enlarge / Thomas Campion

Follow your saint ... / Thomas Campion

Kind are her answers / Thomas Campion

Still to be neat, still to be drest / Ben Johnson

Go, soul, the body's guest / Sir Walter Raleigh

What is our life? / Sir Walter Raleigh

Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part / Michael Drayton

And now methinks I could e'en chide myself / Cyril Tourneur

Whenas the nightingale chaunted her vespers / John Cleveland

From The fairies' farewell / Richard Corbet

Air and angels / John Donne

The legacy / John Donne

A hymn to God the Father / John Donne

The good-morrow / John Donne

At the round Earth's imagined corners, blow / John Donne

Death, be not proud ... / John Donne

Epitaph on the Countesse Dowager of Pembroke / William Browne

Epitaph in obitum M. S. x° Maij, 1614 / William Browne

Beauty is but a flower / Thomas Nashe

The quip / George Herbert

The temper / George Herbert

Virtué / George Herbert

The pulley / George Herbert

The collar / George Herbert

Easter / George Herbert

And now in age I bud again / George Herbert

To the meadows / Robert Herrick

To keep a true Lent / Robert Herrick

"I dare not ask a kiss" / Robert Herrick

An ode for Ben Jonson / Robert Herrick

"Hey nonny no!" / Anonymous

"My love in her attire ..." / Anonymous

The garden / Andrew Marvell

Bermudas / Andrew Marvell

The definition of love / Andrew Marvell

To his coy mistress / Andrew Marvell

The mower to the glow-worms / Andrew Marvell

From A Horatian ode upon Cromwell / Andrew Marvell

From Paradise lost / John Milton

On a fly drinking from his cup / William Oldys

"My soul, there is a country" / Henry Vaughan

"Alice is tall and upright as a pine" / Charles Cotton

"Margaret of humbler stature by my head" / Charles Cotton

Zimri / John Dryden

Achitophel / John Dryden

"All, all of a piece throughout" / John Dryden

"When I consider life ..." / John Dryden

From The epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot / Alexander Pope

Conclusion from The Dunciad / Alexander Pope

From St. Philip and St. James / Christopher Smart

A short song of congratulation / Samuel Johnson

From The vanity of human wishes / Samuel Johnson

From Retaliation / Oliver Goldsmith

To spring / William Blake

"Never seek to tell thy love" / William Blake

The garden of love / William Blake

"How sweet I roam'd from field to field" / William Blake

A poison tree / William Blake

The clod and the pebble / William Blake

The defiled sanctuary / William Blake

From Milton / William Blake

Ah! sun-flower / William Blake

The tiger / William Blake

"Of a' the airts ..." / Robert Burnes

"Ye flowery banks" / Robert Burns

Kubla Khan / Samuel Tyler Coleridge

"Dear child of nature, let them rail" / William Wordsworth

From The prelude / William Wordsworth

From Mutability / William Wordsworth

The solitary reaper / Will aim Wordsworth

"Why do our joys depart?" / Walter Savage Landor

"All is not over ..." / Walter Savage Landor

"Past ruin'd Ilion Helen lives" / Walter Savage Landor

"I held her hand, the pledge of bliss" / Walter Savage Landor

"The grateful heart ..." / Walter Savage Landor

Heart's ease / Walter Savage Landor

"Do you remember me? or are you proud" / Walter Savage Landor

"Years, many parti-colored years / Walter Savage Landor

Dirce / Walter Savage Landor

On his own Agamemnon and Iphigeneia / Walter Savage Landor

"Alas, how soon the hours are over" / Walter Savage Landor

"Various the roads of life ..." / Walter Savage Landor

On Catullus / Walter Savage Landor

To

/ Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Indian serenade / Percy Bysshe Shelley

"So, we'll go no more a'roving" / Lord Byron

"Bright star, would I were steadfast" / John Keats

Fragment of an Ode to Maia / John Keats

To a fish / Leigh Hunt

Days / Ralph Waldo Emerson

To Helen / Edgar Allan Poe

To one in Paradise / Edgar Allan Poe

From The princess / Alfred Tennyson

The eagle / Alfred Tennyson

Isolation: to Marguerite / Matthew Arnold

The last word / Matthew Arnold

Two doves upon the selfsame branch / Christina Rossetti

A blue-eyed phantom far before / Christina Rossetti

An idle poet, here and there / Coventry Patmore

I found the phrase to every thought / Emily Dickinson

Because I could not stop for death / Emily Dickinson

My life closed twice before its close / Emily Dickinson

The bustle in a house / Emily Dickinson

The heart asks pleasure first / Emily Dickinson

From Ogier the Dane / William Morris

Chorus from Atalanta in Calydon / Algernon Charles Swinburne

God's grandeur / Gerald Manley Hopkins

The habit of perfection / Gerald Manley Hopkins

Eight o'clock / A.E. Housman

Fancy's knell / A.E. Housman

Leda and the swan / William Butler Yeats

In memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz / William Butler Yeats

Conclusion from Urn burial / Sir Thomas Browne

Odds and ends / Lord Chesterfield ; Marjorie Fleming ; Heinrich Heine ; The Rev. Sydney Smith ; Queen Elizabeth ; Jane Austen ; La Bruyère ; William Lloyd Garrison

From Life on the Mississippi / Mark Twain

From Of friendship / Michel de Montaigne

Three groups of letters / Lady Mary Montagu ; Horace Walpole ; Lord Byron

A simple heart / Gustave Flaubert

The suicide of Petronius / Tacitus

Hosts and guests / Max Beerbohm

From The way of the world / William Congreve

Notes from Underground: part I / Fëdor Dostoevski

Aphorisms / Blaise Pascal ; La Rochefoucauld ; George Savile ; Marquis of Halifax ; William Blake ; William Hazlitt ; Ralph Waldo Emerson

My own centenary / E.M. Forster

The death of Ridley and Latimer / John Foxe

Madame du Deffand / Lytton Strachey

Venus with young Adonis / Bartholomew Griffin

The ploughman's song / Nicholas Breton

Song of Apelles / John Lyly

Song from The old wife's tale / George Peele

Aeliana's ditty / Henry Chettle

On treason / Sir John Harington

When others sing Venite exultemus / John Dowland

Sigh no more, ladies ... / William Shakespeare

Hold back thy hours, dark night / John Fletcher

The good night or blessing / Robert Herrick

Chop-cherry / Robert Herrick

Love not me for comely Grace / John Wilbye

Go, lovely Rose

/ Edward Waller

Of thee, kind boy ... / Sir John Suckling

The siege / Sir John Suckling

Ha, ha! Ha, ha! This world doth pass / Anonymous

O stay, sweet love ... / Anonymous

While Adam slept ... / Anonymous

I have lost my mistress, horse and wife / Anonymous

The world / Anonymous

Three young rats / Anonymous

Green broom / Anonymous

When the devil was sick ... / Anonymous

There was a young poet of Thusis / Anonymous

On Charles II / Lord Rochester

Song / John Crowne

The departing lover / William Walsh

An ode / Matthew Prior

Pious Celinda ... / William Congreve

When Orpheus went down ... / Samuel Lisle

Engraved on the collar of a dog, which I gave to His Royal Highness / Alexander Pope

A toast / John Byron

The king to Oxford sent a troop of horse / Sir William Browne

On the phrase, To kill time / Voltaire

Lord Galloway / Robert Burns

Green grow the rashes, o! / Robert Burns

The jolly beggars / Robert Burns

With women and apples ... / Thomas Moore

Rondeau / Leigh Hunt

The war-song of Dinas Vawr / Thomas Love Peacock

Eheu fugaces / R.H. Barham

Good night to the season / Winthrop Mackworth Praed

From Spectator ab extra / Arthur Hugh Clough

Ode to tobacco / Charles Stuart Calverley

From Alice's adventures in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll

The susceptible chancellor / Sir William Schwenck Gilbert

Good and bad luck / John Hay

Elegy in a country churchyard / Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Ballade d'une grande dame / Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Tender-heartedness / Col. D. Streamer (Harry Graham)

Aunt Eliza / Col. D. Streamer (Harry Graham)

One perfect rose / Dorothy Parker

Table talk / John Selden

The pupil / Henry James