The Spirit of the Hive is the latest of his volumes of essays which include also The Hills of Hingham, Where Rolls the Oregon, Education in a Democracy, The Magical Chance and others. Mr. Sharp’s name is especially familiar to readers of the Atlantic Monthly where many of his essays have first appeared. He has been well described as “a man who sees the world as eternally new, who sees life as eternally young and to whom living is a great adventure.”
SOME GREAT AMERICAN
BOOKS
Out of a hundred great American books, which every American ought to know, what ten or twelve shall I suggest for this course? A difficult question. No two persons would make the same selection. Yet no one, I venture, will say that those I am taking are not eminently worth while.
But, first, may I make a few suggestions on how to read, before I offer advice on what to read? “Not how many but how good books” is the secret of being well read, according to an ancient saying. But very much depends on how well you read those good books.
Put no premium on speed. Don’t dawdle; but take your time. Read the great book sympathetically and in a leisurely way. Be positive about it. Be aggressive, even pugnacious, rather than listless and languishing. Read the stirring sections over and over. Store them in your memory. Cite them in talk and letters—anything to make them yours. Get your friends to reading the same things at the same time. Associate, if you can, with those who do read. Don’t be a literary “soak,” a mere absorber of print. The real reader is critical, which means appreciative of the good and the poor in a book. He stops to enjoy a fine passage in the text as a traveler stops to enjoy a lovely scene in the landscape. He is just as ready to debate a point with his author also—to hold out against him here; to approve and yield the point there; and often to forget the book altogether in his attempt to follow a gleam which, starting out of some illuminating line of the page, goes wavering through the twilight of the reader’s dawning thought,
“And, ere it vanishes
Over the margin,
After it, follow it,
Follow the gleam.”
Again, learn to read aloud—not every book, to be sure, yet as many of these as you can. There is much reading for information and mere pleasure which must be done silently and swiftly, and even with judicious skipping for the sake of speed. The books we are going to read are for pleasure and for information and for something even greater—a spiritual something, a noble companionship and stimulus hard to define, which is as much found in their manner as in their matter, or, as we say, in their style. Good prose is as full of music as good verse. What is sweeter to the hearing ear than the rhythms of prose like John Muir’s or Lincoln’s or Poe’s? English is a beautiful language, containing the most glorious literature ever written. We should revel in its harmonies no less than wrestle with its thoughts.