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For the history of Germany, Austria, Russia, France, Spain, Italy, Holland, and
other countries, the various works in the "Story of the Nations" series, are
excellent brief histories.

Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic and his United Netherlands are highly
important and well written historical works.
The annals of the ancient world are elaborately and ably set forth in Grote's
History of Greece, Merivale's Rome, and Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire.

Another class of books closely allied to biography and history, is the
correspondence of public men, and men of letters, with friends and
contemporaries. These familiar letters frequently give us views of social, public,
and professional life which are of absorbing interest. Among the best letters of
this class may be reckoned the correspondence of Horace Walpole, Madame de
Sevigne, the poets Gray and Cowper, Lord Macaulay,Lord Byron, and Charles
Dickens. Written for the most part with unstudied ease and unreserve, they
entertain the reader with constant variety of incident and character, while at the
same time they throw innumerable side-lights upon the society and the history
of the time.

Next, we may come to the master-pieces of the essay writers. You will often find
that the best treatise on any subject is the briefest, because the writer is put
upon condensation and pointed statement, by the very form and limitations of
the essay, or the review or magazine article. Book-writers are apt to be diffuse
and episodical, having so extensive a canvas to cover with their literary designs.
Among the finest of the essayists are Montaigne, Lord Bacon~ Addison,
Goldsmith, Macaulay, Sir James Stephen, Cardinal Newman, De Quincey, Charles
Lamb, Washington Irving, Emerson, Froude, Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
You may spend many a delightful hour in the perusal of anyone of these authors.

We come now to poetry, which some people consider very unsubstantial
pabulum, but which forms one of the most precious and inspiring portions of the
literature of the world. In all ages, the true poet has exercised an influence upon
men's minds that is unsurpassed by that of any other class of writers. And the
reason is not far to seek. Poetry deals with the highest thoughts, in the most
expressive language. It gives utterance to all the sentiments and passions of
humanity in rhythmic and harmonious verse. The poet's lines are remembered
long after the finest compositions of the writers of prose are forgotten.

They fasten themselves in the memory by the very flow and cadence of the
verse, and they minister to that sense of melody that dwells in every human
brain. What the world owes to its great poets can never be fully measured. But
some faint idea of it may be gained from the wondrous stimulus given through
them to the imaginative power, and from the fact that those sentiments of
human sympathy, justice, virtue, and freedom, which inspire the best poetry of
all nations, become sooner or later incarnated in their institutions. This is the real
significance of the oft quoted saying of Andrew Fletcher, that stout Scotch
republican of two centuries ago, that if one were permitted to make all the
ballads of a nation, he need not care who should make the laws.

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