I would
add, by way of caution, that the moment you become weary from reading,
or grow nervous with studying, you should stop. Studying never does
harm, but nervous excitement does. When you have puzzled your brains an
hour over a problem in arithmetic, the probability is that you have
ceased thinking rationally, and are only plunging deeper and deeper into
confusion. Nervous prostration comes from unreasonable taxation of
the brain oftener than from real, systematic study.
I think you will find a little book by Charles F. Richardson very
helpful in regard to your reading. It is called "The Choice of Books,"
and it treats of such subjects as, "What Books to Read," "How Much
to Read," "What Books to Own," "The Motive of Reading," and other topics
of a similar nature.
It will make an agreeable conclusion to our thoughts on what to read,
and how to read, to quote the following from Richardson: "Homer,
Plutarch, Herodotus, and Plato; Virgil, Livy, and Tacitus; Dante, Tasso,
and Petrarch; Cervantes; Thomas a Kempis; Goethe and Schiller; Chaucer,
Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, Bunyan, Addison,
Gray, Scott, and Wordsworth; Hawthorne, Emerson, Motley, Longfellow,
Bryant, Lowell, Holmes, and Whittier. He who reads these, and such
as these, is not in serious danger of spending his time amiss. But
not even such a list as this is to be received as a necessity by every
reader.
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