Frank Parsons

“ Whatever the power or wit of a book, if its motive is not high and its expression lofty, it should not come into contact with any life, at least until its character is fixed and hardened in the mould of virtue beyond the period of plasticity that might receive the imprint of the badness in the book. There are plenty of splendid books that are pure and ennobling as well as strong and humorous,—more of them than any one person can ever read,—so that there is no necessity of contact with imperfect literature. ”

“ Memory, reason, and discovery are built upon it; and sympathy, the mother of kindness, tenderness, and love, is itself the child of the imagination. Poetry is the married harmony of imagination and beauty. The poet is the man of fancy and the man of music. This is why in all ages mankind instinctively feel that poetry is supreme. Of all kinds of literature, it is the most stimulating, broadening, beautifying, and should have a large place in every life. ”

“ The reader of this little book we hope has gained an inspiration—if it were not his before—that, with a strong and steady step, will lead him into all the paths of beauty and of truth. Each glorious emotion and each glowing thought that comes to us, becomes a centre of new growth. Each wave of pathos, humor, or sublimity that pulses through the heart or passes to the brain, sets up vibrations that will never die, but beautify the hours and years that follow to the end of life. ”

“ Ten schools of philosophy claimed Socrates as their head, but Plato alone represented the master with fulness. Considering the times in which he lived, the grandeur of his thought, the power of his imagination, and the nobility, elegance, originality, and beauty of his writings, Plato has no superior in the whole range of literature. With Plato, ideas are the only realities, things are imperfect expressions of them, and all knowledge is reminiscence of what the soul learned when it was in the land of spirit, face to face with ideas unveiled. ”

“ Learn what other thinkers and workers are doing, that you may appreciate them and aid them. Learn the Past, that you may know the Future. Do not look out upon the world through one small window; open all the doorways of your soul, let all genius and beauty come in, that your life may be bright with their glory.
If you are a busy merchant, artisan, or laborer, you too can give a little time each day to books that are the best. If Plato, Homer, Shakspeare, Tennyson, or Milton came to town to-day, you would not let the busiest hour prevent your catching sight of him ”

“ Shakspeare is the summit of the world's literature. In a higher degree than any other man who has lived on this planet, he possessed that vivid, accurate, exhaustive imagination which creates a second universe in the poet's brain. Between our thought of a man and the man himself, or a complete representation of him with all his thoughts, feelings, motives, and possibilities, there is a vast gulf. ”

“ Pleasure manifestly is, by all these aids to beauty, health, and power, much beholden to the books we read; but more than this, the very reading of a worthy book is a delicious joy, and one that does not drain but fills the fount from which the happiness of others comes. Plato, Fénelon, Gibbon, and a host of others name the love of books the chiefest charm and glory of their lives. ”

“ Perhaps you cannot have the finest teachers in the studies you pursue: what a splendid education one could get if he could learn philosophy with Plato, Kant, and Spencer; astronomy with Galileo, Herschel, and Laplace; mathematics with Newton or Leibniz; natural history with Cuvier or Agassiz; botany with Gray; geology with Lyell or Dawson; history with Bancroft; and poetry with Shakspeare, Milton, Dante, and Homer! Well, those very teachers at their best are yours if you will read their books. Each life is a mixture of white and black, no one is perfect ”

“ What a joy is there in a good book, writ by some great master of thought, who breaks into beauty, as in summer the meadow into grass and dandelions and violets, with geraniums and manifold sweetness.... The books which help you most are those which make you think most.... A great book ... is a ship of thought deep freighted with thought, with beauty too. It sails the ocean, driven by the winds of heaven, breaking the level sea of life into beauty where it goes, leaving behind it a train of sparkling loveliness, widening as the ship goes on. ”

“ He belongs to mankind,—to every age and race; and he certainly must be counted as in the first line of the great creative minds of the world. His unique glory is to have definitely succeeded in the ideal reproduction of historical types, so as to preserve at once beauty, life, and truth,—a task which neither Ariosto and Tasso, nor Corneille and Racine, nor Alfieri, nor Goethe, nor Schiller,—no, nor even Shakspeare himself, entirely achieved.... In brilliancy of conception, in wealth of character, in dramatic art, in glow and harmony of color, Scott put forth all the powers of a master poet.... ”

“ Macaulay. "A great writer is the friend and benefactor of his readers."
Milton. "As good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself,—kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond."
Montaigne. "To divert myself from a troublesome fancy, 'tis but to run to my books." ”

“ As Lowell says, "It is the key which admits us to the whole world of thought and fancy and imagination,—to the company of saint and sage, of the wisest and wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moments. It enables us to see with the keenest eyes, hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time. More than that, it annihilates time and space for us,—reviving without a miracle the Age of Wonder, and endowing us with the shoes of swiftness and the cap of darkness." ”

“ Read other books than those that deal with your profession,—poetry, philosophy, and travel. Get out of the valleys up on to the ridges, where you can see what relation your home bears to the rest of the world. Go stand in the clamor of tongues, that you may learn that the truth is broader than any man's conception of it and become tolerant. Look at the standards that other men use, and correct your own by them. ”

“ Even that beauty which is of the rounded form, the soft cheek's blooming tinge, the rosy mouth, and pearly lip, owes its debt to health; and that, as has been seen, may profit much by literature. And beyond all this we learn the means of great improvement in our comeliness,—how crooked may be changed to straight, and hollow cheeks to oval; frowns to smiles, and lean or gross to plump; ill-fitting, ill-adapted dress to beautiful attire; a shambling gait to a well-conducted walk,—and even the stupid stare of ignorance be turned to angel glances of indwelling power and interested comprehension. ”

“ Next to Shakspeare's Plays, Emerson's Essays and Lectures are to me the richest inspiration. At every turn new and delightful paths open before the mind; and the poetic feeling and imagery are often of the best. Only the music and the power of discriminating the wheat from the chaff were lacking to have made one of the world's greatest poets. To pour into the life the spirit of Emerson, Bacon, and Montaigne is a liberal education in itself. Addison's [57] "Spectator" is inimitable in its union of humor, sense, and imagination. ”

“ Children should be fed with the literature that represents the childhood of the race. Out of that literature has grown all literature. Give a child the contents of the great books of the dawn, and you give him the best foundation for subsequent literary growth, and in after life he will be able to follow the intricate interweaving of the old threads throughout all modern thought. He has an immense affinity for those old books, for they are full of music and picturesqueness, teeming with vigorous life, bursting with the strange and wonderful. ”

“ The difference between talking with a sage or poet for a few brief moments once in your lifetime, and having him daily with you as your friend and teacher is the difference between the vales and summits of this life. The immense importance of possessing the best books for your own cannot be too strongly impressed upon you, nor the value of clothing your noble friends as richly as you can. If they come to you with outward beauty, they will claim more easily their proper share of your attention and regard. ”

“ So far we have spoken of reading for grown people. Now we must deal with the reading of young folks,—a subject of the utmost importance. For to give a child good habits of reading, to make him like to read and master strong, pure books,—books filled with wisdom and beauty,—and equally eager to shun bad books, is to do for him and the world a service of the highest possible character ”

“ Germany, Italy, and Spain have no fiction that compares with ours.
No doubt many will be surprised to find Fielding, Balzac, Tolstoï, and others placed so low in the list as they are. The reason is that the moral tone of a book is, with us, a weightier test of its claims on the attention of the general reader, than the style of the author or the merit of his work from an artistic point of view. There might be some doubt whether or no we ought not to exclude from our tables entirely all books that are not noble enough in character to admit of their being read aloud in the family. ”

“ PHILOSOPHY.
There have been, since the waters of thought began to flow, two great streams running side by side,—Rationalism and Mysticism. Those who sail upon the former recognize Reason as king; those upon the latter enthrone some vague and shadowy power, in general known as Intuition. The tendency of the one is to begin with sense impressions, and out of these to build up a universe in the brain corresponding to the outer world, and to arrive at a belief in God by climbing the stairway of induction and analogy. ”

“ Arnott, Dr. "Books,—the miracle of all possessions, more wonderful than the wishing-cap of the Arabian tales; for they transport instantly, not only to all places, but to all times."
Bacon. "Studies serve for pastimes, for ornaments, for abilities. Their chief use for pastimes is in privateness and retiring; for ornaments, in discourse; and for ability, in judgment.... To spend too much time in them is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules is the humor of a scholar. They perfect nature, and are themselves perfected by experience. ”

“ Useless Books. Many books that are not positively bad are yet mere waste of time. A wise man will not spend the capital of his life, or part with the wealth of his energies except he gets a fair equivalent. He will demand the highest market price for his time, and will not give his hours and moments—precious pieces of his life—for trash, when he can buy with them the richest treasures of three thousand years of thought. You have not time to drink the whole of human life from out the many colored bottles of our literature ”

“ Alcott, A. B. "My favorite books have a personality and complexion as distinctly drawn as if the author's portrait were framed into the paragraphs, and smiled upon me as I read his illustrated pages."
"Next to a friend's discourse, no morsel is more delicious than a ripe book,—a book whose flavor is as refreshing at the thousandth tasting as at the first."
"Next to a personal introduction, a list of one's favorite authors were the best admittance to his character and manners."
"A good book perpetuates its fame from age to age, and makes eras in the lives of its readers." ”

“ The nearer to complete inaction we attain, the nearer we are clay and stone; the more activity we gain, that does not draw from future power, the higher up the cliffs of life we climb, and nearer to celestial life that never sleeps. Let no hour go idly by that [15] can be rendered rich and happy with a glorious bit of Shakspeare, Dante, or Carlyle. Let us never be deluded with the praise of peace, excepting that of heart and conscience clear of all remorse. It is ambition that has climbed the heights, and will through all the future. ”

“ They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are the true levellers. They give to all who will faithfully use them the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our race. No matter how poor I am; no matter though the prosperous of my own time will not enter my obscure dwelling: [175] if the sacred writers will enter and take up their abode under my roof,—if Milton will cross my threshold to sing to me of Paradise; and Shakspeare, to open to me the worlds of imagination and the workings of the human heart ”

“ Knowledge is like the mystic ladder in the patriarch's dream. Its base rests on the primeval earth, its crest is lost in the shadowy splendor of the empyrean; while the great authors, who for traditionary ages have held the chain of science and philosophy, of poesy and erudition, are the angels ascending and descending the sacred scale, and maintaining, as it were, the communication between man and heaven. ”

“ If you teach a child to economize time, and fill him with a love of good books, you ensure him an education far beyond anything he can get in the university,—an education that will cease only with his life. The creation of a habit of industrious study of books that will improve the character, develop the powers, and store the mind with force and beauty,—that is the great object. ”

“ We have, down to this time of 1740, out of a literature covering eleven and a half centuries, recommended to the chief attention of the reader ten great authors,—Chaucer and Spenser, Shakspeare and Bacon, Milton and Taylor, Bunyan and Locke, Pope and Defoe. We now come to the Time of Novelists, Historians, and Scientists, a period in the history of our literature that is so prolific of great writers in all the vastly multiplied departments of thought, that it is no longer possible to particularize in the manner we have done in regard to the preceding ages. ”