tless possible responses, I will
make one that I hope may prove both profitable and attractive.

Let us set out with the recognition of the fact that systematic reading
is far more profitable than desultory reading, even on the same literary
level. One excellent way to achieve system is to read by authors--to
make the author a study, in his writings and his life. To read
Hawthorne's "House of the Seven Gables," for instance, is to drink from
a fountain of the purest spiritual delight; but we gain an additional
delight, even if of a lower kind, when we know something of Hawthorne's
life and his relations to the old town of Salem. In many cases it is
necessary to know the author's life in order really to understand his
book. Now I will suggest the reading, not merely of separate authors,
but of a group. There are many such, of varying degrees of greatness:
the Elizabethan group, the Lake poets, the Byron-Shelley-Keats group,
the mid-nineteenth-century British novelists, to go no further than
writers in English. But I am going to ask your interest in the New
England group of authors who were writing fifty years ago. They comprise
the well-known names of Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Whittier,
Holmes, Thoreau, and Lowell. Each of these delightful writers deserves
to be studied for his own sake, but, if we take them as a group, we
shall gain still more in understanding and profit. How shall we approach
the reading of them? They obviously cannot all be read at once; so let
us begin with any one, say Hawthorne, read his life in Mrs. Field's
brief Beacon Biography, dipping at the same time into his "Note-Books,"
and then read some of his short stories and the "Scarlet Letter." His
biography will already have brought us into contact with most of the
other names, of Longfellow, his college classmate, and of Emerson and
Thoreau, his neighbors at Concord. We may read the Beacon Biography of
Longfellow, but Higginson's would be better, as fuller and more
adequate. We may first read Longfellow's prose works, "Outre-Mer" and
"Hyperion," and then his "Voices of the Night," besides following him in
his "Life, with Extracts from his Journal and Correspondence," edited by
his brother, which is one of the most delightful of books. We shall do
well to read each author's writings in chronological succession; so they
will stand in orderly relation with his life. Similarly we may take up
Emerson first in Mr. Sanborn's Beacon Biography, or in