Franklin
Poor Richard's Almanac
Goethe
Faust, etc.
Goldsmith
Deserted Village
Hamerton
Intellectual Life
Harrison
Choice of Books
Hazlitt
Great and Little Things
Heine
The Romantic School
Henley
Out of the Night
Ibsen
A Doll's House
Jacopone
Stabat Mater
Jewish Literature
The Talmud
Joubert
Essays
Lang
The Divining Rod
Lanier
Marshes of Glynn
Lowell
Chaucer
Luther
Table Talk
Ein Feste Burg
McCarthy
Disasters of Cabul
Marlowe
Dr. Faustus
Maupassant
The Piece of String
Milton
Areopagitica
Mitchell
Dream Life
Molière
Imaginary Invalid
Rossetti, D. G.
Poems
Ruskin
Selections
Sainte-Beuve
Mme. de Staël
Shaler
The Last of Earth and Man
Sienkiewicz
Quo Vadis
Sterne
Selections
Thomas of Celano
Dies Iræ
Walton
Compleat Angler
Apart from the power to appreciate the thought itself, the reader by this time is surely ready to take pleasure in the style of such writers as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, Herrick, and Spenser. And with respect to the matter, he surely will profit in the company of Sir Thomas Browne, Thomas à Kempis, Mill, and Plato, presenting four remarkably valuable points of view in their studies of what is most worth man's consideration. Further reading of interest in style and in matter will be found under the headings of "Essay," "Travel," "Drama," "Oratory," "Philosophy," etc., on pages 46-53 of this Handbook.
One of the chief problems of the reader deals with the question of foreign authors. Perhaps one man in a hundred thousand can find time to learn to read more than four languages fluently. If he is to get in touch with the great writers of other tongues than those which he knows, he must perforce read translations. And for most of us translations are the only resource. The modern writers have been translated with but slight difficulty, mainly because their views of life are so closely akin to ours that their thoughts may be put into English with slight trouble. But the ancients, the masters of Greek and Roman Literature, regarded life from other standpoints than ours. They were mainly interested in interpreting fate and the mysteries of life. Their work, then, is for the most part philosophic, even when presented in the form of drama or of poetry. It is so great, so lofty in tone and so profound in its perception of everlasting truths that we cannot afford to neglect it. But it can only be grasped by a mature mind and by calm and patient meditation. The tragedies of Æschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, the poetry of Lucretius and Cleanthes, and the meditations of Marcus Aurelius rank among the grandest and most sublime works that mortal mind has ever achieved. For complete lists of foreign authors, see the classified entries on pages 28-35 of this Handbook.
[THE INDEX AND THE BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES]
The Use of the Index. The thoughtful and habitual use of the Index will prove of more lasting benefit than any other practice associated with reading. Not only is attention called to authors, to the titles of selections, and to the opening lines of familiar and unfamiliar poems, but hundreds upon hundreds of topics are there listed, dealing with subjects of endless variety as viewed by the ablest minds of the past and the present. Agriculture, for example, is dealt with by ancients and moderns—among others, by Cicero and by Charles Dudley Warner. America's development, we find, has been presented from such diverse viewpoints as those of Ferrero, the modern Italian historian; of Goethe, the master-poet of old Germany, as bitter a foe of Prussia as any who live to-day; of Hamilton, the statesman-economist; of McMaster, the historian; of Henry, the patriot orator; of Leslie Stephen, the English critic, and other leaders of the world's thought. The value of books, the use of chariots of war, the case for and against Charles I of England, the nature of conversation, the progress of the drama in ancient and in more recent times—these topics suggest the amazing diversity of outlook.