19. Longfellow and Whittier.
20. Lowell and Taylor.
21. Robert Browning.
How delightful it would be to follow a programme which should include only American writers, in either prose or poetry!
Again I feel the necessity of urging you to study these authors for the thought there is in their works, and for the style in which those thoughts are expressed. Make these works text-books and pleasure-books.
If you should wish in a more general way to get acquainted with such specimens of English as combine the best style with the best matter, or with such as present either excellency in thought, or beauty in form, you might find help in the following selections. I have culled their titles, for the most part, from the catalogues of our leading schools and colleges:—
Chaucer's "Clerk's Tale;" Shakespeare's plays, particularly "Julius
Caesar," "Merchant of Venice," "Macbeth," and "The Tempest;" Milton's
"Paradise Lost" and "Comus;" first five cantos of Spenser's "Faery
Queen;" Goldsmith's "Deserted Village" and "She Stoops to Conquer;"
Scott's "Lady of the Lake" and "Marmion;" Burns's "Cotter's Saturday
Night;" Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner;" Keats' "Eve of St. Agnes;"
Lowell's "Vision of Sir Launfal;" Longfellow's "Courtship of Miles
Standish" and "Evangeline;" Tennyson's "Princess" and "In Memoriam;"
Whittier's "Snow Bound;" Sidney's "Defence of Poesie;" Bacon's Essays;
Carlyle's "Burns;" Emerson's "Eloquence;" Macaulay's essay on "Milton;"
Thackeray's "Henry Esmond" and "English Humorists;" Dickens's "David
Copperfield" and "Tale of Two Cities;" Scott's "Kenilworth" and "The
Abbot;" George Eliot's "Silas Marner" and "Romola;" Kingsley's "Westward
Ho!"; Irving's "Sketch Book;" Ruskin's "Sesame and Lilies;" Addison's
De Coverley papers; "Essays of Elia;" Longfellow's "Hyperion;"
Whittier's essay on "The Beautiful;" Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter" and
"Twice-Told Tales;" Thoreau's "Excursions;" Leigh Hunt's "Wishing Cap
Papers;" Arthur Helps's essay "On the Art of Living with Others;"
Curtis's "Potiphar Papers;" Prescott's "Last of the Incas;" Motley's
"Siege of Leyden." You will observe these names are given without regard
to system.
Special topics may offer themselves to your mind without reference to an epoch, as the History of Fiction, the History of the Drama; or it may often be most profitable to study the literature of a certain reign or age,—as the Age of Elizabeth, the Reign of Queen Anne, the Period of the English Reformation, the Revolutionary Period. Another way of studying literature is suggested by those who, having a general knowledge of it, devote their hours of reading chiefly to one author, as, for example, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton. Experience proves to me that the study of a certain number of masterpieces, around which selections of less worth may be grouped, is the most thorough way to proceed.
Intimately connected with the study of literature is the science of rhetoric. By means of it we learn to appreciate good style, we are better fitted to criticise the works we read, and are certainly made better able to correct our own faults in writing. It is indispensable to the study of English literature.
As I have already stated, history and literature are closely connected, yet it is quite possible to study history so that it will have no direct bearing upon literature.