Books for every Scholar.

These books of mine, as you well know, are not drawn up here for display, however much the pride of the eye may be gratified in beholding them; they are on actual service.—Southey.

TO assist teachers and scholars, and those who aspire to become such, in making judicious selection of world-famous books for their libraries, I submit the following list, which includes the greater part of all that is the very best and the most enduring in our language. It is not intended to embrace professional works, nor works suited merely for students of specialties. The books named are such as will grace the library of any scholar, no matter what his profession or his preferences; they are books which every teacher ought to know; they are books of which no one can ever feel ashamed. “The first thing naturally, when one enters a scholar’s study or library,” says Holmes, “is to look at his books. One gets a notion very speedily of his tastes and the range of his pursuits by a glance round his book-shelves.” And, take my word for it, if you want a library of which you will be proud, you cannot be too careful as to the character of the books you put in it.

POETRY.

Chaucer’s Poetical Works, or, if not the complete works, at least the “Canterbury Tales.” In speaking of the great works in English Poetry, it is natural to mention Chaucer first, although, as a general rule, he should be one of the last read. “It is sufficient to say, according to the proverb, that here is God’s plenty.”—Dryden.

Spenser’s Faerie Queene, not to be read through, but in selections. “We can scarcely comprehend how a perusal of the Faerie Queene can fail to insure to the true believer a succession of halcyon days.”—Hazlitt.

The Works of William Shakspeare. The following editions of Shakspeare have been issued within the present century: The first Variorum (1813); The Variorum (1821); Singer’s (10 vols. 1826); Knight’s (8 vols. 1841); Collier’s (8 vols. 1844); Verplanck’s (3 vols. 1847); Hudson’s (11 vols. 1857); Dyce’s (6 vols. 1867); Mary Cowden Clarke’s (2 vols. 1860); R. G. White’s (12 vols. 1862); Clark and Wright’s (9 vols. 1866); The Leopold Edition (1 vol. 1877); The Harvard Edition (20 vols. 1881); The Variorum (—vols. 1871—); Rolfe’s School Shakspeare (1872-81); Hudson’s School Shakspeare. “Above all poets, the mysterious dual of hard sense and empyrean fancy.”—Lord Lytton.

Ben Jonson’s Dramatic and Poetical Works, to be read also in selections. “O rare Ben Jonson!”

Christopher Marlowe’s Dramatic Works, especially “Tamburlaine,” “Doctor Faustus,” and “The Jew of Malta.” “He had in him all those brave translunary things which the first poets did have.”—Drayton.

Beaumont and Fletcher, and especially “The Faithful Shepherdess,” a play “very characteristic of Fletcher, being a mixture of tenderness, purity, indecency, and absurdity.”—Hallam.

John Webster’s Tragedies. “To move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is ready to drop, and then step in with mortal instruments to take its last forfeit: this only a Webster can do.”—Charles Lamb.

George Herbert’s Poems. “In George Herbert there is poetry, and enough to spare; it is the household bread of his existence.”—GÉorge Macdonald.

Milton’s Poetical Works. The “Paradise Lost” was mentioned in the former list; but you cannot well do without his shorter poems also. “Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him.”—Charles Lamb.

Pope’s Poetical Works. “Come we now to Pope, that prince of sayers of acute and exquisite things.”—Robert Chambers.

Dryden’s Poems. “Dryden is even better than Pope. He has immense masculine energies.”—Ibid.

Goldsmith’s Select Poems. “No one like Goldsmith knew how to be at once natural and exquisite, innocent and wise, a man and still a child.”—Edward Dowden.

The Poems of Robert Burns. “Burns should be my stand-by of a winter night.”—J. H. Morse.

Wordsworth’s Select Poems. “Nearest of all modern writers to Shakspeare and Milton, yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed and his own.”—Coleridge.

the Poems of Sir Walter Scott. “Walter Scott ranks in imaginative power hardly below any writer save Homer and Shakspeare.”—Goldwin Smith.

The Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. “Mrs. Browning’s ‘Aurora Leigh’ is, as far as I know, the greatest poem which the century has produced in any language.”—Ruskin.

Coleridge’s Select Poems. “The Ancient Mariner,” “Christabel,” and “Genevieve.” “These might be bound up in a volume of twenty pages, but they should be bound in pure gold.”—Stopford Brooke.

The Poems of John Keats. “No one else in English poetry, save Shakspeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of loveliness.”—Matthew Arnold.

The Christian Year, by John Keble. “I am not a churchman,—I don’t believe in planting oaks in flower-pots,—but such a poem as ‘The Rosebud’ makes one a proselyte to the culture it grows from.”—Dr. Holmes.

Tennyson’s Poems. “Tennyson is a born poet, that is, a builder of airy palaces and imaginary castles; he has chosen amongst all forms the most elegant, ornate, exquisite.”—M. Taine.

Longfellow’s Poetical Works. “In the pure, amiable, home-like qualities that reach the heart and captivate the ear, no one places Longfellow second.”—The Critic.

Bryant’s Poetical Works. “The great characteristics of Bryant’s poetry are its strong common-sense, its absolute sanity, and its inexhaustible imagination.”—R. H. Stoddard.

The Poems of John G. Whittier. “The lyric poet of America, his poems are in the broadest sense national.”—Anon.

In addition to the works named above, there are several collections of short poems and selections of poetry invaluable to the student. They are “infinite riches in little room.” I name—

“A large part of what is best worth knowing in ancient literature, and in the literature of France, Italy, Germany, and Spain,” says Lord Macaulay, “has been translated into our own tongue. I would not dissuade any person from studying either the ancient languages or the languages of modern Europe; but I would console those who have not time to make themselves linguists by assuring them that, by means of their own mother tongue, they may obtain ready access to vast intellectual treasures, to treasures such as might have been envied by the greatest linguists of the age of Charles the Fifth, to treasures surpassing those which were possessed by Aldus, by Erasmus, and by Melanchthon.”

I name some of the treasures which you may thus acquire—

Homer’s Iliad. Of this work, without which no scholar’s library is complete, many translations have been made. The most notable are George Chapman’s (1611), Pope’s (1715), Tickell’s (1715), Cowper’s (1781), Lord Derby’s (1867), Bryant’s (1870). Americans will, of course, prefer Bryant’s translation; but Derby’s is more poetical, and the greatest scholars award the palm of merit to Chapman. Says Lowell: “Chapman has made for us the best poem that has yet been Englished out of Homer.”

Æschylus. “Prometheus Bound” has been rendered into English verse by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Agamemnon” has been translated by Dean Milman, and the entire seven tragedies by Dean Potter. “The ‘Prometheus’ is a poem of the like dignity and scope as the Book of Job, or the Norse Edda.”—Emerson.

Aristophanes. The translation by John Hookham Frere is admirable. “We might apply to the pieces of Aristophanes the motto of a pleasant and acute adventurer in Goethe: ‘Mad, but clever.’”—A. W. Schlegel.

Virgil’s Æneid. The best known translations of Virgil are Dryden’s (1697), Christopher Pitt’s (1740), John Conington’s (1870), William Morris’s (1876). Your choice among these will lie between the last two. “Virgil is far below Homer; yet Virgil has genius enough to be two men.”—Lord Lytton.

Horace’s Odes, Epodes, and Satires. There are excellent translations by Conington, Lord Lytton, and T. Martin. “There is Horace, charming man of the world, who will condole with you feelingly on the loss of your fortune, ... but who will yet show you that a man may be happy with a vile modicum or parva rura.”—Ibid.

Dante’s Divina Commedia. Translated by Longfellow. “The finest narrative poem of modern times.”—Macaulay.

Goethe’s Faust. Translated by Bayard Taylor. “What constitutes Goethe’s glory is, that in the nineteenth century he did produce an epic poem—I mean a poem in which genuine gods act and speak.”—H. A. Taine.

Of the best poetry written in the modern foreign tongues, you will have no difficulty in finding excellent translations. There are good English editions of Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso; of Calderon and Camoens; of MoliÈre, Corneille, Racine, and Victor Hugo; and of Goethe and Schiller. And to make your collection complete for all the purposes of a scholar, you will want Longfellow’s “Poets and Poetry of Europe,” containing translations of the best short poems written in the modern European languages.

Of modern poetry, John Ruskin advises beginners to “keep to Scott, Wordsworth, Keats, Crabbe, Tennyson, the two Brownings, Lowell, Longfellow, and Coventry Patmore, whose ‘Angel in the House’ is a most finished piece of writing, and the sweetest analysis we possess of quiet modern domestic feeling.... Cast Coleridge at once aside as sickly and useless; and Shelley as shallow and verbose; Byron, until your taste is fully formed, and you are able to discern the magnificence in him from the wrong. Never read bad or common poetry, nor write any poetry yourself; there is, perhaps, rather too much than too little in the world already.”

Says Frederic Harrison: “I am for the school of all the great men; and I am against the school of the smaller men. I care for Wordsworth as well as for Byron, for Burns as well as for Shelley, for Boccaccio as well as for Milton, for Bunyan as well as Rabelais, for Cervantes as much as for Dante, for Corneille as well as for Shakspeare, for Goldsmith as well as Goethe. I stand by the sentence of the world; and I hold that in a matter so human and so broad as the highest poetry, the judgment of the nations of Europe is pretty well settled.... The busy world may fairly reserve the lesser lights for the time when it knows the greatest well.... Nor shall we forget those wonderful idealizations of awakening thought and primitive societies, the pictures of other races and types of life removed from our own: all those primeval legends, ballads, songs, and tales, those proverbs, apologues, and maxims which have come down to us from distant ages of man’s history,—the old idyls and myths of the Hebrew race; the tales of Greece, of the Middle Ages, of the East; the fables of the old and the new world; the songs of the Nibelungs; the romances of early feudalism; the ‘Morte d’Arthur’; the ‘Arabian Nights;’ the ballads of the early nations of Europe.”

PROSE.

In the following list I shall endeavor to name only the truly great and time-abiding books,—books to be used not simply as tools, but for the “building up of a lofty character,” the turning of the soul inward upon itself, concentrating its forces, and fitting it for greater and stronger achievements. They embody the best thoughts of the best thinkers; and almost any one of them, if properly read and “energized upon,” will furnish food for study, and meditation, and mind-growth, enough for the best of us.

Essays, etc.

The Works of Lord Bacon. (Popular edition.) “He seemed to me ever, by his work, one of the greatest men, and most worthy of admiration, that had been in many ages.”—Ben Jonson.

Religio Medici, by Sir Thomas Browne. “One of the most beautiful prose poems in the language.”—Lord Lytton.

The Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton. Byron says that “if the reader has patience to go through the ‘Anatomy of Melancholy,’ he will be more improved for literary conversation than by the perusal of any twenty other works with which I am acquainted.”

Montaigne’s Essays. (Best edition.) “Montaigne comes in for a large share of the scholar’s regard; opened anywhere, his page is sensible, marrowy, quotable.”—A. Bronson Alcott.

Areopagitica, by John Milton. “A sublime treatise, which every statesman should wear as a sign upon his hand and as frontlets between his eyes.”—Macaulay.

The Spectator. “The talk of Addison and Steele is the brightest and easiest talk that was ever put in print.”—John Richard Green.

Burke’s Orations and Political Essays. “In amplitude of comprehension and richness of imagination, Burke was superior to every orator, ancient or modern.”—Lord Macaulay.

Webster’s Best Speeches. “But after all is said, we come back to the simple statement that he was a very great man; intellectually, one of the greatest men of his age.”—Henry Cabot Lodge.

The Orations of Demosthenes. A good translation is that of Kennedy in Bohn’s Classical Library.

Cicero’s Orations; also Cicero’s Offices, Old Age, Friendship, etc.

Plutarch’s Lives. Arthur Hugh Clough’s revision of Dryden’s Plutarch. “Without Plutarch, no library were complete.”—A. Bronson Alcott.

The Six Chief Lives from Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, edited by Matthew Arnold.

Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. “Scarcely since the days of Homer has the feat been equalled; indeed, in many senses, this also is a kind of heroic poem.”—Carlyle.

Charles Lamb’s Essays. “People never weary of reading Charles Lamb.”—Alexander Smith.

Carlyle’s Works. “No man of his generation has done as much to stimulate thought.”—Alfred Guernsey.

Macaulay’s Essays. “I confess to a fondness for books of this kind.”—H. A. Taine.

Froude’s Short Studies on Great Subjects. “Models of style and clear-cut thought.”—Anon.

The Works of Washington Irving. “In the department of pure literature the earliest classic writer of America.”

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, by Oliver Wendell Holmes. “Something more than an essayist; he is contemplative, discursive, poetical, thoughtful, philosophical, amusing, imaginative, tender—never didactic.”—Mackenzie.

Emerson’s Essays. “A diction at once so rich and so homely as his, I know not where to match in these days of writing by the page; it is like home-spun cloth-of-gold.”—J. R. Lowell.

FICTION.

The novel, in its best form, I regard as one of the most powerful engines of civilization ever invented.

Sir John Herschel.

Novels are sweets. All people with healthy literary appetites love them,—almost all women; a vast number of clever, hard-headed men, judges, bishops, chancellors, mathematicians, are notorious novel-readers, as well as young boys and sweet girls, and their kind, tender mothers.

W. M. Thackeray.

Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe. “‘Robinson Crusoe’ contains (not for boys, but for men) more religion, more philosophy, more psychology, more political economy, more anthropology, than are found in many elaborate treatises on these special subjects.”—F. Harrison.

Don Quixote de la Mancha, by Cervantes. “The work of Cervantes is the greatest in the world after Homer’s Iliad, speaking of it, I mean, as a work of entertainment.”—Dr. Johnson.

Gulliver’s Travels, by Dean Swift. “Not so indispensable, but yet the having him is much to be rejoiced in.”—R. Chambers.

The Vicar of Wakefield, by Goldsmith. “The blotting out of the ‘Vicar of Wakefield,’ from most minds, would be more grievous than to know that the island of Borneo had sunk in the sea.”—Ibid.

The Waverley Novels. If not all, at least the following: Ivanhoe; The Talisman; Kenilworth; The Monastery; The Abbot; Old Mortality; The Antiquary; Guy Mannering; The Bride of Lammermoor; The Heart of Midlothian.

Cooper’s Leather-Stocking Tales.

Dickens’s Novels. Not all, but the following: David Copperfield; Dombey and Son; Nicholas Nickleby; Old Curiosity Shop; Oliver Twist; and The Pickwick Papers.

Thackeray’s Novels. Vanity Fair; Pendennis; The Newcomes; The Virginians; Henry Esmond.

George Eliot’s Novels. Adam Bede; The Mill on the Floss; Romola; Middlemarch; Daniel Deronda.

Corinne, by Madame de StaËl.

Telemachus, by FÉnelon. (Hawkesworth’s translation.)

Tom Jones, by Fielding. “We read his books as we drink a pure, wholesome, and rough wine, which cheers and fortifies us, and which wants nothing but bouquet.”—H. A. Taine.

Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, by Goethe. (Carlyle’s translation.)

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Novels. The Scarlet Letter; The Marble Faun; The Blithedale Romance; The House of Seven Gables.

Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo.

Hypatia and Alton Locke, by Charles Kingsley.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Mrs. Stowe. “We have seen an American woman write a novel of which a million copies were sold in all languages, and which had one merit, of speaking to the universal heart, and was read with equal interest to three audiences, namely, in the parlor, in the kitchen, and in the nursery of every house.”—Emerson.

Innocents Abroad, by Mark Twain.

Bulwer-Lytton’s Novels. The Caxtons; My Novel; Zanoni; The Last of the Barons; Harold; The Last Days of Pompeii.

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte BrontË.

John Halifax, Gentleman, by Mrs. Craik.

This list might be readily extended; but I forbear, resolved rather to omit some meritorious works than to include any that are unworthy of the best companionship.

I close this chapter with Leigh Hunt’s pleasant word-picture descriptive of his own library: “Sitting last winter among my books, and walled round with all the comfort and protection which they and my fireside could afford me,—to wit, a table of high-piled books at my back, my writing-desk on one side of me, some shelves on the other, and the feeling of the warm fire at my feet,—I began to consider how I loved the authors of those books; how I loved them too, not only for the imaginative pleasures they afforded me, but for their making me love the very books themselves, and delight to be in contact with them. I looked sideways at my Spenser, my Theocritus, and my Arabian Nights; then above them at my Italian Poets; then behind me at my Dryden and Pope, my Romances, and my Boccaccio; then on my left side at my Chaucer, who lay on my writing-desk; and thought how natural it was in Charles Lamb to give a kiss to an old folio, as I once saw him do to Chapman’s Homer.... I entrench myself in my books, equally against sorrow and the weather. If the wind comes through a passage, I look about to see how I can fence it off by a better disposition of my movables; if a melancholy thought is importunate, I give another glance at my Spenser. When I speak of being in contact with my books, I mean it literally. I like to be able to lean my head against them.... The very perusal of the backs is a ‘discipline of humanity.’ There Mr. Southey takes his place again with an old Radical friend; there Jeremy Collier is at peace with Dryden; there the lion, Martin Luther, lies down with the Quaker lamb, Sewell; there Guzman d’Alfarache thinks himself fit company for Sir Charles Grandison, and has his claims admitted.... Nothing, while I live and think, can deprive me of my value for such treasures. I can help the appreciation of them while I last, and love them till I die; and perhaps I may chance, some quiet day, to lay my over-beating temples on a book, and so have the death I most envy.”