This is the last installment of my three-part study of William James, a philosopher I find uniquely compelling. William James was born in New York City in 1842, spent most of his adult life at Harvard University, and died in 1910 at his home in New Hampshire. He originally trained to be a medical doctor, and in this capacity he spent his early academic career absorbing the fascinating writings of new European "psychologists" like Ivan Pavlov and Sigmund Freud.

I admit to pleasures that some literary academics frown on. Sure, I love the classics, but I also like books about scandal and skullduggery. Bob Woodward's Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi; Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Ed Wood; and Penny Stallings' Rock'N'Roll Confidential are fun to read.

Perhaps this is why, when I am called upon to name my favorite writer associated with the so-called "Lake Poets" of the 1800's (William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, sometimes Percy Bysshe Shelley), I will tell you that I like Thomas deQuincey.

Not a poet himself, deQuincey wrote most of his prose for magazines and newspapers. Much of these works were later collected and published as books. DeQuincey's best known work is Confessions of an Opium Eater. By today's standards it's a rather tame tale, but it was considered edgy in its own time. There is evidence that both Edgar Allen Poe and Charles Baudelaire were influenced by deQuincey to try the narcotic. Besides using opium in his autobiographical account, deQuincey raised eyebrows when he told his readers about a prostitute he befriended. Apparently, sex was not involved; people just didn't admit to "slumming" back then.

Let's take a moment for Ismail Merchant, co-creator of some of the best literary films of our time, who died yesterday, May 25, in a London Hospital at age 68.

From 'Shakespeare Wallah' in 1965 to 'The Golden Bowl' in 2000, the team of Ismail Merchant, James Ivory and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala produced films steeped in the greatness of Victorian and modern literary traditions, often adapted from books by authors like E. M. Forster and Henry James.

'A Room With A View' was their first breakthrough success, though in my opinion the team hit its peak in 1992 and 1993 with the wonderful 'Howards End' followed by the soaring, sublime 'Remains of the Day', featuring Anthony Hopkins as a repressed butler in a grand mansion. This film contained a smaller cast and fewer costumes than most Merchant-Ivory productions, but was probably their most thrilling work of all.

"I live in the mist beyond time and place, where imagination and dreams meet, and music is born on golden wings destined to pierce the veils of mystery. It is I who whisper from the far reaches into a mortal's thoughts. It is I who strikes the heart chords and makes them hum with the joyous sound of creation. I am the cause to her effect and affection."

The Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, 1798-1837, was a contemporary of the great English Romantic poets such as Shelley, Keats and Byron who lived in Italy, though he never had the chance to meet them. He was born in Recanati, a small town of the Marche region, then part of the Papal States.

The novelist and short story writer Henry James was born on April 15, 1843 in a house on the north side of Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, New York City.

Born in Bombay, India to John and Alice Kipling on the 30th of December, 1865, Rudyard Kipling had a luminescent early childhood and benefited greatly from his parents' love of foreign cultures and arts. However, the young boy became unhappy when forced to leave the fascinating land of India and live in England from the age of five.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson - 'Lewis Carroll' as he was to become known - was born into a comfortable middle class family, on January 27 1832, the son of the Rev. Charles Dodgson, of Daresbury, Cheshire, England, and his wife Frances Jane. He was the third child, and first son of a family of eleven children.

In the early 1800s there were a group of writers known as The Lake Poets. This was because they all lived in the "Lake District" in northwestern England. They are usually listed as a trio, but only two of them are really famous. The Lake Poets are: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Robert Southey. These poets were part of what was called The Romantic Movement from the late 1700s and early 1800s.

All our best men
are laughed at
in this nightmare land
--Jack Kerouac "Pomes All Sizes
Originated by art school friends William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, who called everything they hated 'slosh,' including Raphael's 'Transfiguration,' the Pre-Raphaelites rejected the Renaissance and embraced Medieval times. They were sick of the pretentious conventionality of theVictorian era. Like the Beat Generation writers in the 1950's, the Pre-Raphaelites--a hundred years earlier-- were rejecting the oppressiveness and cheap moralizing of their era. Pre-punk rogues and radicals, they were outside of society.