The man who would get the ripest culture from books ought to read many, but there are a few books which he must read; among them, first and foremost, are the Bible, and the works of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe.  These are the supreme books of life as distinguished from the books of knowledge and skill.  They hold their places because they combine in the highest degree vitality, truth, power, and beauty.  They are the central reservoirs into which the rivulets of individual experience over a vast surface have been gathered; they are the most complete revelations of what life has brought and has been to the leading races; they bring us into contact with the heart and soul of humanity.  They not only convey information, and, rightly used, impart discipline, but they transmit life.  There is a vitality in them which passes on into the nature which is open to receive it.  They have again and again inspired intellectual movements on a wide scale, as they are constantly recreating individual ideals and aims.  Whatever view may be held of the authority of the Bible, it is agreed that its power as literature has been incalculable by reason of the depth of life which it sounds and the range of life which it compasses.  There is power enough in it to revive a decaying age or give a new date and a fresh impulse to a race which has parted with its creative energy.  The reappearance of the New Testament in Greek, after the long reign of the Vulgate, contributed mightily to that renewal and revival of life which we call the Reformation; while its translation into the modern languages liberated a moral and intellectual force of which no adequate measurement can be made.  In like manner, though in lesser degree, the “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” the “Divine Comedy,” the plays of Shakespeare, and “Faust” have set new movements in motion and have enriched and enlarged the lives of races.

With these books of life every man ought to hold the most intimate relationship; they are not to be read once and put on the upper shelves of the library among those classics which establish one’s claim to good intellectual standing, but which silently gather the dust of isolation and solitude; they are to be always at hand.  The barrier of language has disappeared so far as they are concerned; they are to be had in many and admirable translations; one evidence of their power is afforded by the fact that every new age of literary development and every new literary movement feels compelled to translate them afresh.  The changes of taste in English literature and the notable phases through which it has passed since the days of the Elizabethans might be traced or inferred from the successive translations of Homer, from the work of Chapman to that of Andrew Lang.  One needs to read many books, to browse in many fields, to know the art of many countries; but the books of life ought to form the background of every life of thought and study.  They need not, indeed they cannot, be mastered at once; but by reading in them constantly, for brief or for long intervals, one comes to know them familiarly, and almost insensibly to gain the enrichment and enlargement which they offer.  Moreover, they afford tenfold greater and more lasting delight, recreation, and variety than all the works of lesser writers.  Whoever knows them in a real sense knows life, humanity, art, and himself.