Such a club, meeting two or three evenings in a week, will be able to get through a very large amount of good reading in a few months, and what seemed labor at first will soon become a genuine pleasure and a means of intellectual recreation. No one knows better than myself the up-hill work that attends solitary reading or study. Not one in a thousand can be counted on to continue reading alone, month after month, with no stimulus, except perhaps occasional talks with some one who is interested in the same books. It is dreary work at best, relieved only by the joy of mental growth and development. To share one's pleasure in a book is like sharing enjoyment in a splendid view or a fine work of art: it helps to fix that book in the mind. One never knows whether he has thoroughly mastered a book until he attempts to put in words his impressions of the volume and of the author. To discuss favorite books with congenial associates is one of the great pleasures of life, as well as one of the best tests of knowledge.
With all the equipment that has been devised in the way of notes and comment by the best editors, the text of the great books of the world should offer no difficulties to one who understands English and who has an ordinary vocabulary. The very fact that some of these old writers have novel points of view should be a stimulus to the reader; for in this age of the limited railroad train, the telephone, the automobile and the aeroplane, it is well occasionally to be reminded that Shakespeare and the writers of the Bible knew as much about human nature as we know today, and that their philosophy was far saner and simpler than ours, and far better to use as a basis in making life worth living.
Milton's
Paradise Lost and
Other Poems
A Book That Ranks Close to the English Bible—It Tells the Story of Satan's Revolt, the Fall of Man and the Expulsion from Eden.
In beginning with the great books of the modern world two works stand out in English literature as preëminent, ranking close to the Bible in popular regard for nearly four hundred years. These are Milton's Paradise Lost and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. To those of New England blood whose memory runs back over forty years these two books fill much of the youthful horizon, for, besides the Bible, these were almost the only books that were allowed to be read on Sunday. It seems strange in these days of religious toleration that Sunday reading should be prescribed, but it was a mournful fact in my early days and it forced me, with many others, to cultivate Milton and Bunyan, when my natural inclinations would have been toward lighter and easier reading. But that old Puritan rule, like its companion rule of committing to memory on Sunday a certain number of verses in the Bible, served one in good stead, for it fixed in the plastic mind of childhood some of the best literature that the world has produced.
Portrait of Milton
after the Original Crayon Drawing from
Life by William Faithorne at
Bayfordbury, Herts