Marie Corelli

A cloud floated slowly above the mountain peak. Vast, fleecy and white as the crested foam of a sea-wave, it sailed through the sky with a divine air of majesty, seeming almost to express a consciousness of its own grandeur. Over a spacious tract of Southern California it extended its snowy canopy, moving from the distant Pacific Ocean across th...

THE following story does not assume to be what is generally understood by a ""novel."" It is simply the account of a strange and daring experiment once actually attempted, and is offered to those who are interested in the unseen ""possibilities"" of the Hereafter, merely for what it is,-a single episode in the life of a man who voluntarily sacri...

THE KING'S PLEASAUNCE ""In the beginning,"" so we are told, ""God made the heavens and the earth."" The statement is simple and terse; it is evidently intended to be wholly comprehensive. Its decisive, almost abrupt tone would seem to forbid either question or argument. The old-world narrator of the sublime event thus briefly chronicled was a po...

""Dream by dream shot through her eyes, and each Outshone the last that lighted.""-Swinburne. Midnight,-without darkness, without stars! Midnight-and the unwearied sun stood, yet visible in the heavens, like a victorious king throned on a dais of royal purple bordered with gold. The sky above him,-his canopy,-gleamed with a cold yet lustrous blu...

London,-and a night in June. London, swart and grim, semi-shrouded in a warm close mist of mingled human breath and acrid vapour steaming up from the clammy crowded streets,-London, with a million twinkling lights gleaming sharp upon its native blackness, and looking, to a dreamer's eye, like some gigantic Fortress, built line upon line and towe...

I, who write this, am a dead man. Dead legally-dead by absolute proofs-dead and buried! Ask for me in my native city and they will tell you I was one of the victims of the cholera that ravaged Naples in 1884, and that my mortal remains lie moldering in the funeral vault of my ancestors. Yet-I live! I feel the warm blood coursing through my veins...

All the bells were ringing the Angelus. The sun was sinking; - and from the many quaint and beautiful grey towers which crown the ancient city of Rouen, the sacred chime pealed forth melodiously, floating with sweet and variable tone far up into the warm autumnal air. Market women returning to their cottage homes after a long day's chaffering di...