Of the best poetry written in the modern foreign tongues, you will have no difficulty in finding excellent translations. There are good English editions of Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso; of Calderon and Camoens; of Molière, Corneille, Racine, and Victor Hugo; and of Goethe and Schiller. And to make your collection complete for all the purposes of a scholar, you will want Longfellow’s “Poets and Poetry of Europe,” containing translations of the best short poems written in the modern European languages.
Of modern poetry, John Ruskin advises beginners to “keep to Scott, Wordsworth, Keats, Crabbe, Tennyson, the two Brownings, Lowell, Longfellow, and Coventry Patmore, whose ‘Angel in the House’ is a most finished piece of writing, and the sweetest analysis we possess of quiet modern domestic feeling.... Cast Coleridge at once aside as sickly and useless; and Shelley as shallow and verbose; Byron, until your taste is fully formed, and you are able to discern the magnificence in him from the wrong. Never read bad or common poetry, nor write any poetry yourself; there is, perhaps, rather too much than too little in the world already.”
Says Frederic Harrison: “I am for the school of all the great men; and I am against the school of the smaller men. I care for Wordsworth as well as for Byron, for Burns as well as for Shelley, for Boccaccio as well as for Milton, for Bunyan as well as Rabelais, for Cervantes as much as for Dante, for Corneille as well as for Shakspeare, for Goldsmith as well as Goethe. I stand by the sentence of the world; and I hold that in a matter so human and so broad as the highest poetry, the judgment of the nations of Europe is pretty well settled.... The busy world may fairly reserve the lesser lights for the time when it knows the greatest well.... Nor shall we forget those wonderful idealizations of awakening thought and primitive societies, the pictures of other races and types of life removed from our own: all those primeval legends, ballads, songs, and tales, those proverbs, apologues, and maxims which have come down to us from distant ages of man’s history,—the old idyls and myths of the Hebrew race; the tales of Greece, of the Middle Ages, of the East; the fables of the old and the new world; the songs of the Nibelungs; the romances of early feudalism; the ‘Morte d’Arthur’; the ‘Arabian Nights;’ the ballads of the early nations of Europe.”
PROSE.
In the following list I shall endeavor to name only the truly great and time-abiding books,—books to be used not simply as tools, but for the “building up of a lofty character,” the turning of the soul inward upon itself, concentrating its forces, and fitting it for greater and stronger achievements. They embody the best thoughts of the best thinkers; and almost any one of them, if properly read and “energized upon,” will furnish food for study, and meditation, and mind-growth, enough for the best of us.
Essays, etc.
The Works of Lord Bacon. (Popular edition.) “He seemed to me ever, by his work, one of the greatest men, and most worthy of admiration, that had been in many ages.”—Ben Jonson.
Religio Medici, by Sir Thomas Browne. “One of the most beautiful prose poems in the language.”—Lord Lytton.
The Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton. Byron says that “if the reader has patience to go through the ‘Anatomy of Melancholy,’ he will be more improved for literary conversation than by the perusal of any twenty other works with which I am acquainted.”
Montaigne’s Essays. (Best edition.) “Montaigne comes in for a large share of the scholar’s regard; opened anywhere, his page is sensible, marrowy, quotable.”—A. Bronson Alcott.
Areopagitica, by John Milton. “A sublime treatise, which every statesman should wear as a sign upon his hand and as frontlets between his eyes.”—Macaulay.
The Spectator. “The talk of Addison and Steele is the brightest and easiest talk that was ever put in print.”—John Richard Green.
Burke’s Orations and Political Essays. “In amplitude of comprehension and richness of imagination, Burke was superior to every orator, ancient or modern.”—Lord Macaulay.
Webster’s Best Speeches. “But after all is said, we come back to the simple statement that he was a very great man; intellectually, one of the greatest men of his age.”—Henry Cabot Lodge.
The Orations of Demosthenes. A good translation is that of Kennedy in Bohn’s Classical Library.
Cicero’s Orations; also Cicero’s Offices, Old Age, Friendship, etc.
Plutarch’s Lives. Arthur Hugh Clough’s revision of Dryden’s Plutarch. “Without Plutarch, no library were complete.”—A. Bronson Alcott.
The Six Chief Lives from Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, edited by Matthew Arnold.
Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. “Scarcely since the days of Homer has the feat been equalled; indeed, in many senses, this also is a kind of heroic poem.”—Carlyle.
Charles Lamb’s Essays. “People never weary of reading Charles Lamb.”—Alexander Smith.
Carlyle’s Works. “No man of his generation has done as much to stimulate thought.”—Alfred Guernsey.
Macaulay’s Essays. “I confess to a fondness for books of this kind.”—H. A. Taine.
Froude’s Short Studies on Great Subjects. “Models of style and clear-cut thought.”—Anon.
The Works of Washington Irving. “In the department of pure literature the earliest classic writer of America.”
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, by Oliver Wendell Holmes. “Something more than an essayist; he is contemplative, discursive, poetical, thoughtful, philosophical, amusing, imaginative, tender—never didactic.”—Mackenzie.
Emerson’s Essays. “A diction at once so rich and so homely as his, I know not where to match in these days of writing by the page; it is like home-spun cloth-of-gold.”—J. R. Lowell.
FICTION.