Invitations. Invitation to Hsiao Chü-shih / Po Chü-I -- Inviting a friend to supper / Ben Jonson -- Epistle 1.5 / Horace -- from The life of Samuel Johnson / James Boswell -- from My mother's house / Colette -- The walrus and the carpenter / Lewis Carroll -- To Thomas Manning / Charles Lamb -- Here's a bottle and an honest friend / Robert Burns -- My boat / Raymond Carver -- To the bachelor of arts P'ei Ti / Wang Wei -- Horses in flowers / Sappho -- The pasture / Robert Frost -- The evils of Spain / V.S. Pritchett.

Classic essays. from Nicomachean ethics / Aristotle -- from On friendship / Cicero -- from Of friendship / Michel de Montaigne -- from Of friendship / Francis Bacon -- from The rambler, no. 64 ; from The rambler, no. 40 ; from The idler, no. 23 / Samuel Johnson -- from The life of Samuel Johnson / James Boswell.

Letters : group 1. To Joseph Haydn ; To Baron Gottfried von Jacquin / Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart -- To George Strahan ; To James Boswell ; To Hester Thrale / Samuel Johnson -- To the Rev. James Stopford / Jonathan Swift -- To Jonathan Swift / Alexander Pope -- To Madame d'Épinay / Jean-Jacques Rousseau -- To Captain Richard Brown / Robert Burns -- To Jane Williams / Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley -- To J.H. Reynolds ; To Benjamin Bailey ; To J.H. Reynolds ; To Benjamin Bailey ; To James Rice ; To Benjamin Bailey ; To Charles Brown ; To C.W. Dilke ; To the George Keatses ; To John Taylor ; To Charles Brown / John Keats.

Poetry. from The Iliad / Homer -- Epistle 1.3 / Horace -- Epigram 5.42 ; Epigram 1.32 / Martial -- Hearing that his friend was coming back from the war / Wang Chien -- Old age ; The letter ; To Liu Yu-Hsi ; Dreaming that I went with Lu and Yu to visit Yüan Chēn / Po Chü-I -- from The divine comedy / Dante Alighieri -- Dante Alighieri to Guido Cavalcanti / Dante Alighieri -- To Giovanni da Pistoja on the painting of the Sistine Chapel ; To Tommaso Cavalieri / Michelangelo Buonarroti -- from The faerie queene / Edmund Spenser -- from To the immortal memory of that noble pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison / Ben Jonson -- To the memory of my beloved, the author, Mr. William Shakespeare, and what he had left us / Ben Jonson -- To Mr T.W. / John Donne -- To Mrs. Mary Awbrey ; from Friendship / Katherine Philips -- Friendship between Ephelia and Ardelia ; To a friend / Anne Finch -- from Verses on the death of Dr. Swift, D.S.P.D. / Jonathan Swift -- from Retirement / William Cowper -- A poison tree ; To Hayley ; To forgive enemies Hayley does pretend / William Blake -- To J.R. / John Keats -- May and death / Robert Browning -- We two, how long we were fool'd ; As toilsome I wander'd Virginia's woods ; I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing / Walt Whitman -- I'm nobody! who are you? ; I showed her hights she never saw ; We talked as girls do ; Elysium is as far / Emily Dickinson -- A snow-storm / Giosuè Carducci -- The rakes of Mallow / Anonymous -- A confession to a friend in trouble ; The man he killed / Thomas Hardy -- A Shropshire lad, LIV / A.E. Housman -- The municipal gallery re-visited ; Friends ; The lover pleads with his friend for old friends ; A deep-sworn vow ; To a friend whose work has come to nothing / William Butler Yeats -- Mr. Flood's party / Edwin Arlington Robinson -- The listeners / Walter De La Mare -- Sonnets to Orpheus, 1.24, 2.8 / Rainer Maria Rilke -- Boris Pasternak ; There are four of us ; If all who have begged help / Anna Akhmatova -- In memoriam / Giuseppe Ungaretti -- To my friend / Wilfred Owen -- The friends / Bertolt Brecht -- Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejias / Federico García Lorca -- To Francisco López Merino ; To a minor poet of the Greek anthology / Jorge Luis Borges -- Poem / Langston Hughes -- from Hearts of gold / Ogden Nash -- For friends only ; The common life / W.H. Auden -- Elegy for Jane / Theodore Roethke -- Do the others speak of me mockingly, maliciously? / Delmore Schwartz -- What is the opposite of two? / Richard Wilbur -- With mercy for the greedy / Anne Sexton -- Vita amicae / Ursula K. Le Guin -- Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff / Adrienne Richt -- Forest of Europe / Derek Walcott -- The view from Mount Saint Helens / Michael S. Harper -- Friends through at New Year's / August Kleinzahler.

Affinities : group I. This lime-tree bower my prison / Samuel Taylor Coleridge -- from The Grasmere journals / Dorothy Wordsworth -- from Christabel / Samuel Taylor Coleridge -- To William Wordsworth / Samuel Taylor Coleridge -- Popular fallacies, XVI : that a sulky temper is a misfortune ; The old familiar faces / Charles Lamb.

The Bible. from The book of Ruth. Chapters 1-4 ; from The book of Samuel. Book I, chapters 18, 19, 20, 23, 31 ; Book 2, chapters 1, 4, 9.

Shakespeare. Sonnet 29 ; Sonnet 30 ; Sonnet 32 ; Sonnet 37 ; Sonnet 71 ; Sonnet 104 ; Sonnet 116 ; from A midsummer night's dream ; from The merchant of Venice ; from 1 Henry IV ; from 2 Henry IV ; from Julius Caesar ; from As you like it ; from Hamlet ; from Timon of Athens ; from The winter's tale ; from The two noble kinsmen / William Shakespeare.

Letters : group 2. To Nathaniel Hawthorne / Herman Melville -- To Susan Gilbert (Dickinson) / Emily Dickinson -- Correspondence / George S. Hillard and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Short stories. The voice / V.S. Pritchett -- The three hermits / Leo Tolstoy -- Ithaka / Guy Davenport -- Kashtanka / Anton Chekhov -- Otherwise birds fly in / Nadine Gordimer -- Brooksmith / Henry James -- Miss Tempy's watchers / Sarah Orne Jewett -- Guests of the nation / Frank O'Connor -- The fisherman who had no one to go out in his boat with him / William Maxwell -- Friendship / S.Y. Agnon -- A little cloud / James Joyce.

Letters : group 3. Correspondence / Gustave Flaubert and Ivan Turgenev -- from Edward Lear : landscape painter and nonsense poet / Angus Davidson -- To Emily Tennyson ; To Ruth Decie ; To John Ruskin / Edward Lear -- To Hugh Walpole ; To William Dean Howells / Henry James -- To O.W. Holmes, Jr. ; To his class at Radcliffe College / William James -- To William Makepeace Thackeray / Edward Fitzgerald.

Affinities : group 2. To Theodore Dreiser ; To James Joyce ; To Jim Tully / H.L. Mencken -- My friend McNulty / James Thurber -- Ring ; To Ernest Hemingway ; To Maxwell Perkins / F. Scott Fitzgerald -- from Max Perkins : editor of genius / A. Scott Berg -- To Sidney Cox / Robert Frost -- To Malcolm Cowley ; To Robert K. Haas ; To Erik Boheman ; To Mrs. Robert K. Haas ; To Robert K. Haas ; To Phillip E. Mullen / William Faulkner.

Memoirs and histories. from Juvenile journal / Fanny Burney -- from Paris was yesterday / Janet Flanner -- from Memoirs / Frédéric Mistral -- from Marianne Thornton : a domestic biography / E.M. Forster -- from Your mirror to my times / Ford Madox Ford -- from De profundis / Oscar Wilde -- from Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave / Frederick Douglass -- from Pioneers of France in the New World / Francis Parkman -- Gwendolyn / Elizabeth Bishop -- from Clear pictures / Reynolds Price -- from Julia / Lillian Hellman -- from Night / Elie Wiesel -- from Sketches from a life / George F. Kennan.

Letters : group 4. To Eberhard Bethge / Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- Correspondence / Thomas Mann and Erich Kahler -- Correspondence / Albert Campus and Boris Pasternak.

Affinities : group 3. To Marianne Moore / T.S. Eliot -- To Ezra Pound / Vivien Eliot -- Correspondence / T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound -- from Efforts of affection : a memoir of Marianne Moore / Elizabeth Bishop -- Crusoe in England / Elizabeth Bishop -- from Four poems for Elizabeth Bishop / Robert Lowell -- Correspondence / T.S. Eliot and Groucho Marx -- To Gummo Marx ; To Russell Baker / Groucho Marx.

Further essays. from A week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers / Henry David Thoreau -- from Friendship / Ralph Waldo Emerson -- from Notes on English character ; from What I believe / E.M. Forster -- from Men in dark times / Hannah Arendt -- from A discourse of the nature, offices, and measures, of friendship / Jeremy Taylor -- from Friendship / Simone Weil -- from Friendship / C.S. Lewis.

Fables, legends, and folktales. Birds of a feather ; A friend in need is a friend indeed / Aesop -- Fable 8.11 : The two friends / Jean De La Fontaine -- from The gouernour / Sir Thomas Elyot -- from Somewhere a master / Elie Wiesel -- Yoruban folktale -- from Childhood and poetry / Pablo Neruda -- from The people of the sea / David Thomson.

Affinities : group 4. School ; Our afterlife II / Robert Lowell -- from Robert Trail Spence Lowell / Peter Taylor -- from Gulliver in Lilliput : remembering Robert Lowell / Seamus Heaney -- Ford Madox Ford ; from Randall Jarrell, 1914-1965 / Robert Lowell -- The sounds of rain / Seamus Heaney.

Letters : group 5. To Olivia Shakespear / William Butler Yeats -- from Journals / Lady Gregory -- To Henry Yorke / Evelyn Waugh -- To Gerald Brenan ; To Dora Carrington ; from Diary / Virginia Woolf -- To William Plomer ; To Virginia Woolf / Elizabeth Bowen.

Farewells. On seeing off Meng Hao-Jan ; Taking leave of a friend ; Exiles' letter / Li Po -- To Wei Pa, a retired scholar / Tu Fu -- An excuse for not returning the visit of a friend / Mei Yao Ch'en -- To Ch 'i-wu Ch 'ien bound home after failing in an examination / Wang Wei -- from To the ship in which Virgil sailed to Athens / Horace -- To Thomas Moore / George Gordon, Lord Byron -- To a friend parting / Robert Penn Warren -- To a friend going on a journey / Mahammed Abdille Hassan -- Anaktoria / Sappho -- from Return to yesterday / Ford Maddox Ford -- Auld lang syne / Robert Burns.