INDISPENSABLE BOOKS
Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare and Goethe.
(The best translation of Homer for the ordinary reader is by Chapman. Norton's translation of Dante and Taylor's translation of Goethe's Faust are recommended.)
A GOOD LIBRARY
Besides the works mentioned everyone should endeavor to have the following:
Plutarch's Lives, Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Chaucer, Imitation of Christ (Thomas a Kempis), Holy Living and Holy Dying (Jeremy Taylor), Pilgrim's Progress, Macaulay's Essays, Bacon's Essays, Addison's Essays, Essays of Elia (Charles Lamb), Les Miserables (Hugo), Heroes and Hero Worship (Carlyle), Palgrave's Golden Treasury, Wordsworth, Vicar of Wakefield, Adam Bede (George Eliot), Vanity Fair (Thackeray), Ivanhoe (Scott), On the Heights (Auerbach), Eugenie Grandet (Balzac), Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne), Emerson's Essays, Boswell's Life of Johnson, History of the English People (Green), Outlines of Universal History, Origin of Species, Montaigne's Essays, Longfellow, Tennyson, Browning, Whittier, Ruskin, Herbert Spencer.
A good encyclopoedia is very desirable and a reliable dictionary indispensable.
MASTERPIECES OF AMERICAN LITERATURE
Scarlet Letter, Parkman's Histories, Motley's Dutch Republic, Grant's Memoirs, Franklin's Autobiography, Webster's Speeches, Lowell's Bigelow Papers, also his Critical Essays, Thoreau's Walden, Leaves of Grass (Whitman), Leather-stocking Tales (Cooper), Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, Ben Hur and Uncle Tom's Cabin.