James Hosmer Penniman

“ Because the imagination is developed early, children are able to find a real delight in poetry even when it is beyond their complete understanding. Sir Walter Scott says:—"There is no harm, but, on the contrary, there is benefit in presenting a child with ideas beyond his easy and immediate comprehension. The difficulties thus offered, if not too great or too frequent, stimulate curiosity and encourage exertion."
As a melody once heard keeps on repeating itself in the ears, so a beautiful thought makes an impression upon the mind that may never be effaced. ”

“ There is no information which people are so ready to give as about books, indeed when you ask them they feel flattered. When Franklin wished to make friends with a man that he suspected of hostile sentiments he borrowed a book of him and returned it promptly.
To find out what the best books are is no difficult matter, but to find out what are the best books for us requires a self-knowledge that takes life-long study. In reading we must feel our way, we cannot tell what is best for us all at once. We need to get acquainted with our own minds, to learn what our powers and tastes are. ”

“ There are constant allusions in literature and in life to books with which everyone is supposed to be acquainted, such as the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare, Pilgrim’s Progress, Scott and Longfellow. One cannot always choose his business in life, sometimes he is forced to do the first thing that comes to hand, but he need not engage in any recreation that he does not choose and it is his own fault if his pleasures are mean ones. We often meet people whose minds seem flat and stale because they derive their highest inspiration from nothing more elevating than the daily papers. ”

“ How, [14] then, at this critical age to present the most vital of all the elements of education, is a supremely important problem. It is my conviction that you can only do so through literature; and the New Testament itself might well be read simply as literature. The words, the phrases, the ideals which literature offers so lavishly, unconsciously stir the mind to lofty motives and the true perception of the meaning of life. We must not, of course, commit the fatal blunder of making a didactic lesson out of what is read. ”

“ Books are always ready to do for us all that our mental state will admit. No man was ever so wretched that he could not claim and receive the companionship and sympathy of the best thought of the best men. No life is so cheerless that it cannot be brightened by books.
Doctor Johnson thought that the most miserable man is he who cannot read on a rainy day. How much those miss who have no love of reading, how time must hang heavily on their hands in illness, in bad weather, in the long evenings. Emerson liked to read and study in a tumultuous privacy of storm. ”

“ To keep the heart open to elevating influences, to enjoy really beautiful things, to take a dignified and noble view of life, these are the results that must follow association with the best thoughts of the best minds, which is literature. And it is one of the wonders of literature that some of the best of it is adapted to every order of intelligence. When one gets older his mental field widens, [17] he cannot then read all the best, he must choose; but the classic books for children are not so numerous that the child may not read and reread them. ”

“ Fortunately this can be said of few books but many contain inaccuracies, mis-statements and exaggerations. Weigh and consider all you read in the light of your own experience. Books like life of which they are expressions and authors who produce them are of all kinds, good and bad, uplifting and degrading, true and false. We must value them for what they are, not for what they pretend to be, and, setting aside our own preconceptions and prejudices, lay our minds open to those who seriously and sincerely hold other views than ours. ”

“ Do we not all know many people who seem to live in a mental vacuum—to whom indeed, we have great difficulty in attributing immortality because they apparently have so little life except that of the body? Fifteen minutes a day of good reading would have given any one of this multitude a really human life. The uplifting of the democratic masses depends on this implanting at school of the taste for good reading. ”

“ The Dark Ages are called so because few books were written in them, and Africa is the Dark Continent because it has no literature.
No other works of man have done so much to spiritualize the race as books. The Laocoon is not as inspiring a creation as the Iliad, the Cologne Cathedral is not as civilizing as Dante’s Divine Comedy, and it has been said that the works of Goethe have advanced the progress of mankind more than all the conquests of Napoleon. Books have more soul than any other human work. A house without books is as dark as a house without windows. ”

“ The value of reading poetry aloud is very great. Few school children do it well, and it is especially difficult for them to avoid reading in a sing-song way with a decided pause at the end of every line. "Accuracy of diction," says Ruskin, "means accuracy of sensation, and precision of accent, precision of feeling." Reading poetry aloud is therefore an accomplishment worthy of earnest cultivation. "Of equal honor with him who writes a grand poem is he who reads it grandly," Longfellow has said, and Emerson, "A good reader summons the mighty dead from their tombs and makes them speak to us." ”

“ Reading is often the only pleasure of the sick, bringing to their rooms the heroes of all ages and the scenes of all climes so that they may forget their sufferings in sailing the ocean with Columbus, or leaving the smoke and turmoil of the city they may wander with Thoreau in leafy nooks by the crystal waters of Walden. Sitting in a poor room, ill-fed and ragged a man may entertain Sir Walter Scott or Lord Macaulay and dismiss them without ceremony when he tires of them. ”

“ It is well known that imagination is the creative power of the mind which gives life to all work, so that without it Newton would never have found the law of gravitation, nor Columbus have discovered America. The world of make-believe is filled with delight for the small child. ”

“ A book may have a message for every one but not the same message for each; one it may encourage, another it may rebuke; one it may lead further in the path he is treading, another it may stop and turn into a better way. Habits of thought due to inheritance or occupation modify and in some measure determine the effect of a book and the nature of its message for each reader.
You should adapt books to your mental state, after a hard day’s work the mind easily wearies, while with the strength of the morning you may read the very best that you are capable of. ”

“ Education and culture would be of small value if they were to be terminated by the expiration of a few short years of life. Books are the only work of man that may be said to be omniscient. They are the stored-up memory of the race. As all our experience of life would vanish without memory, so all accurate knowledge of mankind would evaporate without books and we should have nothing to depend upon but tradition.
Without books we should know nothing of the workings of the mighty minds of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare or Milton. ”

“ Cultivate his imagination by helping the child to image what he has read. Let us play that we are sailing with Columbus in a little ship over the great green ocean. When we look far off from the top of a wave we see nothing but sky and white-capped water; all around us are angry faces and angry waves.
It is easy to work on the emotions of a little child and thoughtless persons may find it amusing but it is a serious matter, for it has an injurious effect upon his nerves. Ghost stories and books which inspire fear of the supernatural often do much harm to imaginative children. ”

“ Literature is the most enduring of the fine arts. No painter, sculptor, or architect has erected so permanent a memorial as the poets have done. Statues may be broken, pictures may fade or be consumed by fire, even the pyramids may crumble away, but the thought contained in great books such as the Iliad and the Aeneid is more nearly eternal than marble or bronze. ”

“ Many of the most inspiring deeds of our history have been embodied in poems like Paul Revere's Ride with which every child should be familiar. The works of Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell and Holmes abound in teachings of the highest form of American patriotism and in character studies of the great men who have made our country what it is. The poetry that we have known and loved in childhood has from its very association a strength and sweetness that no other can have. ”

“ Both Poetry and History are in a sense impersonal, being concerned not so much with individuals as such, as with the ideals toward which or the ideas with which men live their lives and do their work. It is biography to which we turn for the most intimate and detailed personal knowledge of a particular great man who may have been the poet whose lines have met response in every heart or the writer whose mind has guided a nation. As dealing with life itself biography may well be regarded as one of the important divisions of literature. ”