A certain eighteenth-century German noble ventured abroad and returned with a series of amusingly outrageous stories. Baron Munchausen's astounding feats included riding cannonballs, traveling to the Moon, and pulling himself out of a bog by his own hair. Listeners delighted in hearing about these u[...]

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's greatest work, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", is utterly unique, unlike any other ballad. No narrative poem has rivaled it in combining scenes of terror with scenes of incomparable beauty. Although enormously popular in the nineteenth century, it is seldom read or studi[...]