Having lived in the city of Orphalese for twelve years, the revered Prophet is about to board a ship taking him back to the isle of his birth. Before he departs, a group of people gather round and ask him to share his wisdom.

“The Raven” is by far Poe’s best-known poem and it is one of more than forty to be found in The Raven and Other Poems, a volume that collects the best of Poe’s exercises in verse. Here, readers are treated to such masterpieces as “Annabel Lee,” “The Haunted Palace,” “The Conqueror Worm,” “The City in the Sea,” “Lenore,” and many more. These poems are imbued with the somber seriousness that we associate with Poe’s macabre fiction, but also with his marvelous appraisals of the mysteries of our and other worlds, and his fervent belief in undying love.

The Secret Garden opens by introducing us to Mary Lennox, a sickly, foul-tempered, unsightly little girl who loves no one and whom no one loves. At the outset of the story, she is living in India with her parents

I will put that poor little boy on the top of the tree, and then I will knock down the wall, and my garden shall be the children’s playground for ever and ever.

The Sonnets are William Shakespeare’s most popular works, and a few of them, such as Sonnet 18, Sonnet 116, and Sonnet 73, have become the most widely-read poems in all of English literature.

Anne Bronte’s second but last novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was first published in 1848 under the pseudonym of Acton Bell, and was an immediate success. It is now considered to be the one of the first feminist novels.