Again, learn to read aloud—not every book, to be sure, yet as many of these as you can. There is much reading for information and mere pleasure which must be done silently and swiftly, and even with judicious skipping for the sake of speed. The books we are going to read are for pleasure and for information and for something even greater—a spiritual something, a noble companionship and stimulus hard to define, which is as much found in their manner as in their matter, or, as we say, in their style. Good prose is as full of music as good verse. What is sweeter to the hearing ear than the rhythms of prose like John Muir’s or Lincoln’s or Poe’s? English is a beautiful language, containing the most glorious literature ever written. We should revel in its harmonies no less than wrestle with its thoughts. There is no invariable answer to the question, how to read, any more than to the question, what to read, because books are of so many sorts and values, and readers are just as diverse. Much reading is required for general intelligence. A wide acquaintance with good books is about all there is to an education. You may have a college diploma or you may not; but if you are not a reader, no matter how many degrees you may possess, you are not possessed of an education. To know the King James Version of the _Bible_, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, _Don Quixote_, _Mother Goose_, _Uncle Remus_, and such books—this is to be on speaking terms with the learned and cultured of the world. We are Americans, and this is a course in American books, but we and our books are very much what the past, the Old World and its books, has made us. Any wide course of reading ought to include the great books of that Old World out of which we have come, books which all the world loves and has gone to school to. The spirit and institutions of our country are English, like our language. So true is this that we can hardly understand our American mind and customs unless we read the history and the literature of Old England. The great English authors like Chaucer, Spenser, Burns, Wordsworth, Burke, and Dickens belong as much to us as to England, and not to know them is not to know whence we came and who we are in the way of feeling and thought. No time, no nation, no book, no man, lives to himself alone, or is self-begotten and wholly original. This is not a required course, and all that I can do is to suggest some of the books which have meant much to me, and which have a durable place in our love and thought. It would be well should I name one hundred titles, say, and let you choose. That is about all that one can do.