English tongue may be counted upon
the fingers. Shakespeare fitly heads the list--a world's classic,
unsurpassed for reach of imagination, variety of scenes and characters,
profound insight, ideal power, lofty eloquence, moral purpose, the most
moving pathos, alternating with the finest humor, and diction unequalled
for strength and beauty of expression. Milton, too, in his minor poems,
has given us some of the noblest verse in the language. There is poetry
enough in his L'Allegro and Il Penseroso to furnish forth a whole galaxy
of poets.

Spenser and Pope, Gray and Campbell, Goldsmith and Burns, Wordsworth and
the Brownings, Tennyson and Longfellow,--these are among the other
foremost names in the catalogue of poets which none can afford to
neglect. Add to these the best translations of Homer, Virgil, Horace,
Dante, and Goethe, and one need not want for intellectual company and
solace in youth or age.

Among the books which combine entertainment with information, the best
narratives of travellers and voyagers hold an eminent place. In them the
reader enlarges the bounds of his horizon, and travels in companionship
with his author all over the globe. While many, if not the most, of the
books of modern travellers are filled with petty incidents and personal
observations of no importance, there are some wonderfully good books of
this attractive class. Such are Kinglake's "Eothen, or traces of travel
in the East," Helen Hunt Jackson's "Bits of Travel," a volume of keen and
amusing sketches of German and French experiences, the books of De Amicus
on Holland, Constantinople, and Paris, those on England by Emerson,
Hawthorne, William Winter, and Richard Grant White, Curtis's Nile Notes,
Howell's "Venetian Life," and Taine's "Italy, Rome and Naples."

The wide domain of science can be but cursorily touched upon. Many
readers get so thorough a distaste for science in early life--mainly from
the fearfully and wonderfully dry text-books in which our schools and
colleges have abounded--that they never open a scientific book in later
years. This is a profound mistake, since no one can afford to remain
ignorant of the world in which we live, with its myriad wonders, its
inexhaustible beauties, and its unsolved problems. And there are now
works produced in every department of scientific research which give in a
popular and often in a fascinating style, the revelations of nature which
have come through the study and investigation o