The Harvard Classics is a 51-volume anthology of classic works from literature by Harvard University president Charles Eliot first published in 1909. Eliot worked with professor of English William A. Neilson to determine the works to be included and Neilson selected the specific editions and wrote introductory notes. Each volume had 400-450 pages, and the included texts are "so far as possible, entire works or complete segments of the world's written legacies." The collection was met with great success.
The purpose of The Harvard Classics is to present so ample and characteristic a record of the stream of the world's thought that the observant reader's mind shall be enriched, refined, and fertilized by it.
Full text of the entire set of the Harvard Classics may be found at the following link: The Harvard Classics- P.F. Collier & Son edition
Or you may wish to peruse each volume by author and title below and click on the full text to the individual work.
19 Goethe: Faust, Egmont, etc. Marlowe: Doctor Faustus
20 Dante. The Divine Comedy
21 Manzoni. I Promessi Sposi
22 Homer. The Odyssey
23 Dana. Two Years Before the Mast
24 Burke. On the Sublime; Reflections on the Revolution in France, etc.
25 J. S. Mill and Thomas Carlyle
26 Continental Drama
27 English Essays, Sidney to Macaulay
28 English and American Essays
29 Darwin. Voyage of the Beagle
30 Faraday, Helmholtz, Kelvin, Newcomb, etc.
31 Cellini. Autobiography
32 Montaigne, Sainte-Beuve, Renan, etc.
33 Voyages and Travels
34 Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hobbes
35 Froissart, Malory, Holinshed
36 Machiavelli, More, Luther