This English verse translation of Goethe's West-Eastern Divan aims to give English-readers a fair indication of the themes, quality and flavour of Goethe's major cycle of lyric poetry. As far as possible it remains faithful to Goethe's metrical and rhyming patterns. The Divan's wealth of earnest depth and passion is conveyed with an often casual simplicity of vocabulary and expression. It moves through changing moods from which wit and grace and good humour are never long absent when the mind is, as in these poems, at play and in command. Goethe described this complexity as «Unconditional submission to the unfathomable will of God, serene conspectus of the activities of this earth, mobile and always in circles and spirals, love, inclination hovering between two worlds, all the real purified, dissolving in symbol». The English translation seeks to keep to the poetic tones in Goethe's seemingly effortless words.

In 1794 Goethe and Schiller were engaged in a correspondence concerning the connection of the human soul with the world of the senses on one hand and with the supersensory on the other. While Schiller approached the question in a philosophical way, Goethe embodied his thoughts in a fantasy entitled The Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. In his fantasy, Lily represents the ideal world of the supersensory that is separated from the Green Snake, or the sensory, by a river. The goal is to build a bridge across the river that will connect the sensory and super sensory realms, and thereby establish a new, conscious spiritual awareness. The other characters in the fairytale-the Ferryman, the Old Woman, the Youth, the Will-o'-Wisps and the Old Man with the Lamp represent various aspects of the soul working together to accomplish this mighty task. A commentary on The Character of Goethe as shown in the Fairy Story is provided by Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian philosopher and thinker. An invaluable guide, it illuminates much of the deep symbology that is contained in this simple, universal fairytale.

The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily is a fairy tale by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published in 1795. The story revolves around the crossing and bridging of a river, which represents the divide between the outer life of the senses and the ideal aspirations of the human being. It has been claimed that it was born out of Goethe's reading of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and that it is full of esoteric symbolism.

In the Magnum Opus Hermetic Sourceworks series.

Here is a book about Walden that takes Thoreau on his own terms. Two Fish on One Hook is a transcendental study of Thoreau's transcendental work. It offers us the task of doing as Thoreau does, exhorting us to follow the patterns Thoreau sets up in Walden and to approach his work as "an act of communication"--one that urges us to listen, to hear, and to act upon what he has to say, one that becmes a transformative experience. "Thoreau's first step is to remind us of how very idle and blockheaded we are. The busy folk 'mind[ing] their own affairs' he leaves to their own devices. Books about Walden are also obliged to begin on the right note by sounding Thoreau's stern wake-up call. Many will find it a jarring note, but there is no better way to wake up from the Procrustean 'sense of men asleep' and to get 'a sick one to lay down his bed and run' into Walden in time. It may be wisdom to let the dead bury the dead; but Thoreau is convinced that 'a man is not requried to bury himself.' He, therefore, begins by asking his readers "Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?'" --Raymond Tripp

In the spring of 1922, several months after completing Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse wrote a fairy tale that was also a love story, inspired by the woman who was to become his second wife. That story, Pictor's Metamorphoses, is the centerpiece of this anthology of Hesse's luminous short fiction. Based on The Arabian Nights and the work of the Brothers Grimm, the nineteen stories collected here represent a half century of Hesse's short writings. They display the full range of Hesse's lifetime fascination with fantasy--as dream, fairy tale, satire, or allegory.