poetry; or, to express the same thought in other words,
above the organ music of his verse sounds clear and far the trumpet call
of personality. Therefore Milton is destined to inspire generations by
which his theology and his justification of the ways of God to man are
swept into his own limbo of myth and delusion. Fortunately Milton's
verse is not appallingly great in amount. If we cannot hope to know it
all by heart, as Macaulay did, we can at least know it well enough to
recognize any quotation from it, and rich will be the furnishing of our
minds when we have made this true.

In our beadroll of the world's greatest writers I shall mention only one
more, Goethe. He is the modern man who touched life most widely,
penetratingly, and sanely. His long life came down so near to ours that
many of us have had friends who were in childhood or infancy his
contemporaries. It is fair to say that since his death the world has
moved much nearer to his mental attitude than it stood in his lifetime,
and one of the agencies that have wrought the change is the living force
of his own works, which led and still lead the thought of men. Goethe
may be called the ideal creative critic of life. He held up a mirror,
not to Nature, as Shakespeare did, but to society; and society can get
away from the image which it sees reflected there only by growing away
from it.

Here let us close our list, not because there are no other great writers
to choose from, but because it is long enough for our present purposes,
and because, from this point on, every addition is open to challenge. I
have intentionally pitched my counsel high; some of my readers may feel
like calling it a counsel of perfection; but according to my way of
thinking, no writer is too good for any of us to read. Moreover, I
honestly think the list interesting. It is not chiefly reading for
recreation, but for soul expansion, and it means intellectual effort.
Unless we wrestle with an author as Jacob did with the angel, we shall
not receive the highest blessing. But some one may plead that, while he
does not wish to read wholly for amusement, he is not in a condition,
either from training or circumstances, to engage in mental athletics. He
cannot apply himself to an author as he recognizes that the greatest
writers deserve; but he is willing to read with attention, and he should
like to feel that what he is reading is good literature. This is a
reasonable request, and, out of coun