Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), a Victorian essayist, novelist and poet is an ardent advocate of courage and optimism. His philosophy of life, as reflected in his highly popular essays included in ‘Virginibus Puerisque’, ‘Memories and Portraits’ and ‘Familiar Studies of Men and Books’ acts as a panacea for the evils of Modern Age characterized by materialism and overall pessimism. The study of Victorian English Literature is incomplete without studying Stevensons’s essays. They are highly anthologized all over the world. Hence the present book will be of immense help to the students, academicians and the lovers of literature who wish to appreciate Stevenson’s essays critically with the focus on his philosophy of life.

An analysis of novelistic explorations of modernism in mathematics and its cultural interrelations.

There is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown the springs and mechanism of any art. All our arts and occupations lie wholly on the surface; it is on the surface that we perceive their beauty, fitness, and significance; and to pry below is to be appalled by their emptiness and shocked by the coarseness of the strings and pulleys. In a similar way, psychology itself, when pushed to any nicety, discovers an abhorrent baldness, but rather from the fault of our analysis than from any poverty native to the mind. And perhaps in �sthetics the reason is the same: those disclosures which seem fatal to the dignity of art seem so perhaps only in the proportion of our ignorance; and those conscious and unconscious artifices which it seems unworthy of the serious artist to employ were yet, if we had the power to trace them to their springs, indications of a delicacy of the sense finer than we conceive, and hints of ancient harmonies in nature. This ignorance at least is largely irremediable. We shall never learn the affinities of beauty, for they lie too deep in nature and too far back in the mysterious history of man.

In this selection of Gilbert Harman's shorter writings in moral philosophy, the essays are divided into four sections, focusing on moral relativism, values and valuing, character traits and virtue ethics, and ways of explaining aspects of morality.

Reproduction of the original: A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson