A Course of English Reading: Adapted to Every Taste and Capacity: with Anecdotes of Men of Genius

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Wiley and Putnam, 1845 - Best books - 243 pages
 

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Page 9 - What we read with inclination makes a much stronger impression. If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention, so there is but one half to be employed on what we read*;" and this the Doctor said when sixty-seven years had rolled over his sober head.
Page 26 - not such events or precepts as are gathered by reading, but such remarks, similitudes, allusions, assemblages, or inferences, as occasion prompted or inclination produced ; those thoughts which were generated in his own mind, and might be usefully applied to some future purpose. Such is the labour of those who write for immortality.'''
Page 39 - and sometimes lead on the student, step by step, till he reaches the purest sphere of intellectual existence. The first of the classes into which I divide readers then, I consider, like Desdemona, they would have all narrators of Othello's caste, and would read of— battles, sieges, fortunes ;— of most disastrous chances, Of moving accidents, by flood and field ; Of hair-breadth scapes i' the imminent deadly breach j— of
Page 39 - quarries, rocks, and hills whoso heads touch heaven;— And of the Cannibals that each other eat, The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do
Page 22 - remark, that one half of the world does not know how the other half lives, and if it is not generally known how many things half the world lives and dies without enjoying, most truly may this be said of intellectual stores. How few would like to confess the little that they know—at least, the very limited number of correct replies they could at any moment sit
Page 52 - more to be envied than a memory, fraught with the most varied stores of reading. The one possesses, but the other coins. Butler, the author of the Analogy, said, " Whoever will in the least attend to the thing will see that it is not the having
Page 62 - a thousand questions are continually arising, a thousand subjects of inquiry presenting themselves, which keep his faculties in constant exercise, and his thoughts perpetually on the wing, so that lassitude is excluded from life, and that craving after artificial excitement and dissipation of mind,
Page 166 - Thirdly. For readers of mature mind, who can enter into historical disquisitions and historical reflections :— " Notes (Moral, Religious, Political, Economical, Educational, and Phrenological,) on the United States of America." Of this it is enough to say, that it is written by George Combe.
Page 132 - and Menandar, and all the Greek poets, Plutarch and Polybius, Xenophon, and all those other excellent persons of both faculties, whose choicest dictates are collected by Stobeeus ; Plato and his scholars, Aristotle, and after him Porphyry, and all his other disciples, Pythagoras, and
Page 43 - viands. When instructive subjects are proposed they soon find " house affairs to draw them hence," and must be amused like Desdemona before they will " seriously incline and with greedy ear devour up my discourse." When one of this class sits down to a book of sterling worth, he looks at his watch, prepares his marker,

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