As a rule we like to do only those things that we think we do well; therefore, unless you can train your pupils to read fairly well, they are not likely to form the reading habit. Some one has well said that education consists in the creation of tastes and the formation of habits. As reading does more than all other subjects taught in school to continue the education of children after they leave school, we should spare no effort to see that they read well. The selections from Longfellow, Hawthorne, Holmes, Whittier, Lowell, Margaret J. Preston, Björnson, and Fiske are made by permission of, and by arrangement with, Houghton Mifflin Company, the authorized publishers of their works. Thanks are extended to Little, Brown, and Company for selections from Parkman; to G. P. Putnam's Sons for selections from Washington Irving; to D. Appleton and Company for selections from William Cullen Bryant; and to Charles Scribner's Sons for a selection from Miss Dodge. "But have you ever rightly considered what the mere ability to read means? That it is the key which admits us to the whole world of thought and fancy and imagination? To the company of saint and sage, of the wisest and wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moment? That it enables us to see with the keenest eyes, hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time? More than that, it annihilates time and space for us; it revives for us without a miracle the Age of Wonder, endowing us with the shoes of swiftness and the cap of darkness, so that we walk invisible like fern seed, and witness unharmed the plague at Athens or Florence or London; accompany Cæsar on his marches, or look in on Catiline in council with his fellow conspirators, or Guy Fawkes in the cellar of St. Stephen's. We often hear of people who will descend to any servility, submit to any insult, for the sake of getting themselves or their children into what is euphemistically called good society. Did it ever occur to them that there is a select society of all the centuries to which they and theirs can be admitted for the asking, a society, too, which will not involve them in ruinous expense, and still more ruinous waste of time and health and faculties?" -JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 8 |