One Thousand Best Books: The Household Guide to a Lifetime's Reading; a Variorum List

Front Cover
Doubleday, Page, 1924 - Best books - 416 pages
 

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 15 - Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison...
Page 126 - Read Homer once, and you can read no more ; For all books else appear so mean, so poor, Verse will seem prose : but still persist to read. And Homer will be all the books you need.
Page 25 - That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going ; but the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me.
Page 177 - The want of human interest is always felt. Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation ; we desert our master, and seek for companions.
Page 110 - The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, Await alike the inevitable hour — The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
Page 246 - He reads much; He is a great observer and he looks Quite through the deeds of men: he loves no plays, As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music; Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort As if he mock'd himself and scorn'd his spirit That could be moved to smile at any thing.
Page 117 - When Nature was shaping him, clay was not granted For making so full-sized a man as she wanted, So, to fill out her model, a little she spared From some finer-grained stuff for a woman prepared, And she could not have hit a more excellent plan For making him fully and perfectly man.
Page 158 - There is Lowell, who's striving Parnassus to climb With a whole bale of isms tied together with rhyme, He might get on alone, spite of brambles and boulders, But he can't with that bundle he has on his shoulders, The top of the hill he will ne'er come nigh reaching...
Page 108 - ... style, all seem to bespeak his moral as well as his intellectual qualities, and make us love the man at the same time that we admire the author. While the productions of writers of loftier pretension and more sounding names are suffered to moulder on our shelves, those of Goldsmith are cherished and laid in our bosoms. We do not quote them with ostentation, but they mingle with our minds, sweeten our tempers, and harmonize our thoughts ; they put us in good humor with ourselves and with the world,...
Page 173 - Ah! Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language: as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story: as an artist he is everything except articulate.

Bibliographic information