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—
Bryant’s Library of Poetry and Song.
Emerson’s Parnassus.
Ward’s English Poets.
Piatt’s American Poetry and Art.
Appleton’s Library of British Poetry.
Palgrave’s Golden Treasury.
“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 Misérables_, 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.”
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