Part 2

10. =Good Books=.--=A Short Sermon=.--If you are a scholar, professor or lawyer, doctor or clergyman, do not stay locked in the narrow prison of your own department, but go out into the world of thought and breathe the air that comes from all the quarters of the globe. Read other books than those that deal with your profession,--poetry, philosophy, and travel. Get out of the valleys up on to the ridges, where you can see what relation your home bears to the rest of the world. Go stand in the clamor of tongues, that you may learn that the truth is broader than any man's conception of it and become tolerant. Look at the standards that other men use, and correct your own by them. Learn what other thinkers and workers are doing, that you may appreciate them and aid them. Learn the Past, that you may know the Future. Do not look out upon the world through one small window; open all the doorways of your soul, let all genius and beauty come in, that your life may be bright with their glory.

If you are a busy merchant, artisan, or laborer, you too can give a little time each day to books that are the best. If Plato, Homer, Shakspeare, Tennyson, or Milton came to town to-day, you would not let the busiest hour prevent your catching sight of him; you would stand a half day on the street in the sun or the snow to catch but a glimpse of the famous form; but how much better to receive his spirit in the heart than only get his image on the eye! His choicest thought is yours for the asking.

If you are a thoughtless boy or silly girl, trying the arts that win the matrimonial prize, remember that there are no wings that fly so high as those of sense and thought and inward beauty. Remember the old song that ends,--

"Beauty vanish, wealth depart, Wit has won the lady's heart."

Even as a preparation for a noble and successful courtship, the best literature is an absolute necessity. Perhaps you cannot travel: Humboldt, Cook, and Darwin, Livingstone, and Stanley will tell you more than you could see if you should go where they have travelled. Perhaps you cannot have the finest teachers in the studies you pursue: what a splendid education one could get if he could learn philosophy with Plato, Kant, and Spencer; astronomy with Galileo, Herschel, and Laplace; mathematics with Newton or Leibniz; natural history with Cuvier or Agassiz; botany with Gray; geology with Lyell or Dawson; history with Bancroft; and poetry with Shakspeare, Milton, Dante, and Homer! Well, those very teachers at their best are yours if you will read their books. Each life is a mixture of white and black, no one is perfect; but every worthy passage and ennobling thought you read adds to the white and crowds out the black; and of what enormous import a few brief moments daily spent with noble books may be, appears when we remember that each act brings after it an infinite series of consequences. It is an awe-inspiring truth to me that with the color of my thought I tinge the stream of life to its remotest hour; that some poor brother far out on the ocean of the future, struggling to breast the billows of temptation, may by my hand be pulled beneath the waves, ruined by the influences I put in action now; that, standing here, I make the depths of all eternities to follow tremble to the music of my life: as Tennyson has put it so beautifully in his "Bugle Song,"--

"Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying: Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

"O love, they die in yon rich sky, They faint on hill or field or river: _Our echoes roll from soul to soul_, _And grow for ever and for ever_."

How careful we should be of every moment if we had imaginative power enough to fully realize the meaning of the truth that slightly differing actions now may build results at last as wide apart as poles of opposite eternities! Even idleness, the negative of goodness, would have no welcome at our door. Some persons dream away two thirds of life, and deem quiescence joy; but that is certainly a sad mistake. The nearer to complete inaction we attain, the nearer we are clay and stone; the more activity we gain, that does not draw from future power, the higher up the cliffs of life we climb, and nearer to celestial life that never sleeps. Let no hour go idly by that can be rendered rich and happy with a glorious bit of Shakspeare, Dante, or Carlyle. Let us never be deluded with the praise of peace, excepting that of heart and conscience clear of all remorse. It is ambition that has climbed the heights, and will through all the future. Give me not the dead and hopeless calm of indolent contentment, but far rather the storm and the battle of life, with the star of my hopes above me. Let me sail the central flow of the stream, and travel the tides at the river's heart. I do not wish to stay in any shady nook of quiet water, where the river's rushing current never comes, and straws and bubbles lie at rest or slowly eddying round and round at anchor in their mimic harbor. How often are we all like these imprisoned straws, revolving listlessly within the narrow circle of the daily duties of our lives, gaining no new truth, nor deeper love or power or tenderness or joy, while all the world around is sweeping to the sea! How often do we let the days and moments, with their wealth of life, fly past us with their treasure! Youth lies in her loveliness, dreaming in her drifting boat, and wakes to find her necklace has in some way come unfast, and from the loosened ribbon trailing o'er the rail the lustrous pearls have one by one been slipping far beyond her reach in those deep waters over which her slumbers passed. Do not let the pearls be lost. Do not let the moments pass you till they yield their wealth and add their beauty to your lives.

11. =Abbreviations=.--

R. means, Read carefully.

D. means, Digest the best passages; make the thought and feeling your own.

C. means, Commit passages in which valuable thought or feeling is _exquisitely expressed_.

G. means, Grasp the idea of the whole book; that is, the train of the author's thought, his conclusions, and the reasons for them.

S. means, Swallow; that is, read as fast as you choose, it not being worth while to do more than get a general impression of the book.

T. means, Taste; that is, skip here and there, just to get an idea of the book, and see if you wish to read more.

e. means _easy_; that is, of such character as to be within the easy comprehension of one having no more than a grammar-school education or its equivalent; and it applies to all books that can be understood without either close attention or more than an ordinary New England grammar-school training.

m. means _medium_; that is, of such character as to require the close attention called "study," or a high-school education, or both; and it applies to books the degree of whose difficulty places them above the class e. and below the class _d_.

d. means _difficult_; that is, beyond the comprehension of an ordinary person having only a New England high-school education or its equivalent, even with close study, unless the reader already has a fair understanding of the _subject_ of the book. In order to read with advantage books that are marked _d._, the mind should be prepared by special reading of simpler books in the same department of thought.

TABLE I.

NOTE OF EXPLANATION.

+----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's note: The original format of the table exceeded | | the width requirements for e-text. Therefore the table was | | reformatted. It is now from top to bottom in the order of | | importance. The first shelf and second shelf are arranged | | side by side. | +----------------------------------------------------------------+

TABLE I. contains a list of authors whose books, on principle and authority, have the strongest claims on the attention of the average reader of English. They are arranged from left to right in the order of importance of the divisions of the subject matter regarded as wholes, and from above downward in the order of their value in relation to the highest standard in their own department. The _numbers_ have nothing to do with the ranking, but refer to notes that will be found on the pages following the table. There is also, at the head of the notes relating to each column of the table, a special note on the subject matter of that column.

The upper part of the table represents the first shelf of the world's library, and contains the books having the very strongest claims upon the attention of all,--books with which every one should endeavor to gain an acquaintance, at least _to the extent_ indicated in the notes.

The lower part of the table represents the second shelf of the world's library, and contains books which in addition to those of the first shelf should enter into a liberal education.

It must be always kept in mind that intrinsic merit alone does not decide the position of a book in this table; for in order to test the claim of a book upon the attention of a reader we have to consider not only the artistic value of the author's work, and its subject matter, but also the needs and abilities of the reader. Thus it happens that it is not always the work of the greatest genius which stands highest in the list. Moreover, no claim is made that the ranking is perfect, especially on the second shelf. The table is an example of the application of the principles set forth in the remarks following Table V., to the case of the general reader. For every one above or below the average reader the lists would have to be changed, and even the average list has no quality of the absolute. It is but a suggestion,--a suggestion, however, in which we have a good deal of confidence, one that is based on a very wide induction,--and we have no hesitation in affirming that the upper shelf represents the best literature the world affords.

In addition to Table I., there will be found in Tables III. and IV., and in the remarks upon the Guidance of Children following Table IV., a number of pieces of literary work of the very highest merit and value. Some of the most important are Lowell's "Vision of Sir Launfal," one of the very finest American poems; Browning's "Ivan Ivanovitch;" Guyot's "Earth and Man;" Mary Treat's "Home Book of Nature;" Burroughs' "Pepacton," "Signs and Seasons," "Wake Robin," etc.; Buckley's "Fairy Land of Science," etc.; Ragozin's "Chaldea;" Fenelon's "Lives of the Philosophers;" Bolton's "Poor Boys who became Famous;" Rives' "Story of Arnon;" Drake's "Culprit Fay;" Dr. Brown's "Rab and his Friends;" Mary Mapes Dodge's "Hans Brinker;" Andrews' "Ten Boys on the Road;" Arnold's "Sweetness and Light;" Higginson's "Vacations for Saints;" and General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out," a book of great power, which sets forth the most practical method yet proposed for the immediate relief of society from the burdens of pauperism and vice.

TABLE I.--THE WORLD'S BEST BOOKS.

[See explanation on the preceding pages.]

(first shelf) (second shelf)

1. Religion & Morals.

Bible[1] Milton[11] Bunyan[2] Keble[12] Taylor[3] Cicero[13] Kempis[4] Pascal[14] Spencer[5] Channing[15] M. Aurelius[6] Aristotle[16] Plutarch[7] St. Augustine[17] Seleca[8] Butler[18] Epictetus[9] Spinoza[19] Brooks[10] Drummond[10]

2. Poetry & the Drama.

Shakspeare[20] Spenser[27] Homer[21] Lowell[28] Dante[22] Whittier[29] Goethe[23] Tennyson[30] Milton[24] Scott[32] AEschylus[25] Byron[33] Fragments[26] Shelley[34] Keats[35] Campbell[36] Moore[37] Thomson[38] Macaulay[39] Dryden[40] Collins[41] Ingelow[42] Bryant[43] Longfellow[44] Herbert[45] Goldsmith[46] Coleridge[47] Wordsworth[48] Pope[49] Southey[50] Walton[51] Browning[52] Young[53] Jonson[54] Beaumont & F.[55] Marlowe[56] Sheridan[57] Carleton[58] Virgil[60] Horace[61] Lucretius[62] Ovid[63] Sophocles[64] Euripides[65] Aristophanes[66] Pindar[67] Hesiod[68] Heine[69] Schiller[70] Corneille[71] Racine[71] Moliere[71] Musset[74] Calderon[75] Petrarch[76] Ariosto[77] Tasso[78] Camoens[79] Omar[80] Firdusi[81] Hafiz[81] Saadi[81] Arnold[82] Pushkin[83] Lermontoff[84]

3. Science.

Physiology and Hygiene[85] De Tocqueville[99] "Our Country"[86] Von Holst[100] Federalist[88] Smith[101] Bryce[89] Malthus[102] Montesquieu[90] Carey[103] Bagehot[90] Cairnes[104] Mill[91] Freeman[105] Bain[92] Jevons[106] Spencer[93] Mulford[107] Darwin[94] Hobbes[108] Herschel[95] Machiavelli[109] Proctor[95] Max Mueller[110] Lyell[96] Trench[111] Lubbock[96] Taylor[112] Dawson[96] White[113] Wood[97] Cuvier[114] Whewell[98] Cook[115] Tyndall[116] Airy[117] Faraday[118] Helmholtz[119] Huxley[120] Gray[121] Agassiz[122] Silliman[123]

4. Biography.

Plutarch[124] G. Smith[139] Phillips[125] Bourrienne[140] Boswell[126] Johnson[141] Lockhart[127] Walton[142] Marshall[128] Stanley[143] Franklin[128] Irving[144] Nicolay & H.[129] Southey[145] Grant[129] Stanhope[146] Carlyle[130] Moore[147] Renan[130] Jameson[148] Farrar[131] Baring-Gould[149] Emerson[132] Field[150] [100] Greatest Men[133] Hamilton[151] Parton[134] Darwin[151] Hale[135] Alcott[151] Drake[136] Talleyrand[151] Fox[137] Macaulay[151] Grimm[138] Bashkirtseff[151] Guerin[151] Jefferson[151] American Statesmen[151] English Men of Letters[151]

5. History.

Green[152] Creasy [155a] Bancroft[153] Lecky[156] Guizot[154] Clarke[157] Buckle[154] Moffat[158] Parkman[155] Draper[159] Freeman[155] Hallam[160] Fiske[155] May[161] Fyffe[155] Hume[162] Macaulay[163] Froude[164] Gibbon[165] Grote[166] Palfrey[167] Prescott[168] Motley[169] Frothingham [169a] Wilkinson[170] Niebuhr[171] Menzel[172] Milman[173] Ranke[174] Sismondi[175] Michelet[176] Carlyle[177] Thierry[178] Tacitus[179] Livy[180] Sallust[181] Herodotus[182] Xenophon[183] Thucydides[184] Josephus[185] Mackenzie[185] Rawlinson[185]

6. Philosophy.

Spencer[186] Mill[192] Plato[187] Mansel[193] Berkeley[188] Buechner[194] Kant[189] Edwards[195] Locke & Hobbes[190] Bentham[196] Comte[191] Maurice[197] Lewes Hume[198] or Ueberweg Hamilton[199] or Schwegler Aristotle[200] or Schlegel Descartes[201] on the Cousin[201] History of Hegel & Schelling[202] Philosophy. Fichte[203] Erasmus[204] Fiske[205] Hickok[206] McCosh[207] Spinoza[208]

7. Essays.

Emerson[209] Macaulay Bacon[210] Leigh Hunt Montaigne[211] Arnold Ruskin[212] Buckle Carlyle[212] Hume Addison[212] Froude Symonds Steele Browne Johnson De Quincey Foster Hazlitt Lessing Sparks Disraeli Whipple Lamb Schiller Coleridge

8. Fiction.