English literature is the birthright and inheritance of the English race. We have produced and are producing some of the greatest of poets, of philosophers, of men of science. No race can boast a brighter, purer, or nobler literature--richer than our commerce, more powerful than our arms. It is the true pride and glory of our country, and for it we cannot be too thankful. Precious and priceless are the blessings which the books scatter around our daily paths. We walk, in imagination, with the noblest spirits, through the most sublime and enchanting regions,--regions which, to all that is lovely in the forms and colors of earth, “Add the gleam, The light that never was on sea or land, The consecration and the poet’s dream.” Without stirring from our firesides we may roam to the most remote regions of the earth, or soar into realms where Spenser’s shapes of unearthly beauty flock to meet us, where Milton’s angels peal in our ears the choral hymns of Paradise. Science, art, literature, philosophy,--all that man has thought, all that man has done,--the experience that has been bought with the sufferings of a hundred generations,--all are garnered up for us in the world of books. _From “The Use of Life.”_ BREAK, BREAK, BREAK. ALFRED TENNYSON. For a sketch of the life of Tennyson, see Book V, page 102. BREAK, break, break, On thy cold gray stones, O Sea! And I would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me. O well for the fisherman’s boy That he shouts with his sister at play! O well for the sailor lad That he sings in his boat on the bay! And the stately ships go on To their haven under the hill: But O for the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still! Break, break, break, At the foot of thy crags, O Sea! But the tender grace of a day that is dead Will never come back to me. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. [Illustration] WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE was born in the year 1564, at Stratford-on-Avon, in England. Queen Elizabeth was on the throne then, and it was one of the most brilliant periods in all English history. The poems and plays that Shakespeare wrote are the greatest in the English language, and one cannot appreciate the best there is in literature unless he has studied them. It is strange that no one thought, in the time that he lived, of writing his history, so that we might know as much about him and his boyhood as we do of most other great men. Stratford is in the heart of England, and the stream of Avon winds through a beautiful country. There were two famous old castles near by, which had been peopled by knights in armor, and out of whose great stone gateways they had ridden to battle. We are sure that Shakespeare loved to listen to the tales of these old battles, for in later years he based several of his great historical plays upon them.