CHAPTER IV.
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.
O 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.