These essays on the classics illuminate this miracle, life, and its luster, darkness, danger and mystery.Shakespeare's challenge, "To be or not to be," lives on, for humans strive for fulfillment or succumb to life's trials. In these classical selections, life's challenges are confronted or rationalized. Values are positive or negative. Choices succeed or fail relative to whether they were good or evil or nonexistent. For in apathy, failure is inherent. In action, the joys of fulfillment are realized or destruction awaits, all dependent upon good or evil motivations. The retelling of these loved plots takes the reader on a journey that awakens recognitions of human passions, sins, affections, tragedies and triumphs. The trip through cherished books bears the senses through Shakespeare's castles, Jane Austen's parlor, Allen Poe's traumatic maelstrom, Camus' mountain, Walt Whitman's valleys, and Wordsworth's woods and meadows. Some selections, such as John Donne's, move one to reach beyond the self or to introspect. All will motivate you to pick up that revered copy of a classic and read it again. They reveal restrictions that can limit freedom and attitudes that can free and promote the growth of body, mind and spirit.