ESSAYS.
Next to Shakspeare's Plays, Emerson's Essays and Lectures are to me the richest inspiration. At every turn new and delightful paths open before the mind; and the poetic feeling and imagery are often of the best. Only the music and the power of discriminating the wheat from the chaff were lacking to have made one of the world's greatest poets. To pour into the life the spirit of Emerson, Bacon, and Montaigne is a liberal education in itself. Addison's "Spectator" is inimitable in its union of humor, sense, and imagination. A number of eminent men, Franklin among them, have referred to it as the source of their literary power.
Read these essays: R. D. C. G.
[209] Emerson's Essays and Lectures certainly deserve our first attention in this department, because of their poetic beauty and stimulating effect upon the imagination and all that is pure and strong and noble in the character. (Amer., 19th cent.)
[210] Nowhere can be found so much wit and wisdom to the square inch as in Bacon's Essays. (Eng., 1600.)
[211] Montaigne is the most popular of all the world's essayists, because of his common-sense, keen insight, and perfect frankness. The only author we certainly know to have been in Shakspeare's own library. (France, 1580.)
[212] Ruskin's "Ethics of the Dust," "Crown of Wild Olives," "Sesame and Lilies," while somewhat wild in substance as well as in title, are well worthy of reading for the intellectual stimulus afforded by their breadth of view, novelty of expression and illustration, and the intense force—almost fanaticism—which characterizes all that Ruskin says. Ruskin is one of three living writers whom Farrar says he would first save from a conflagration of the world's library. Carlyle is another of the same sort. Read his "Past and Present," a grand essay on Justice. (Eng., 19th cent.)
So far as style is concerned, Addison's Essays in the "Spectator" are probably the best in the world.