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indigestion.

To learn how to write, try this short course: "The fables of La Fontaine'-for clear expression of simple thought.

Sterne's "Sentimental Journey," the best English prose.

Homer's "Odyssey." It will cure you of any admiration for fancy writing.

Read Dante's "Inferno" and his "Paradise" for magnificent writing, which is different from fancy writing. More power of a certain kind is in Dante than in any of the other writers-except Shakespeare, who possesses more of everything than all the others put together.

Read "Don Quixote," by the wonderful Spaniard, Cervantes. There is the marvel of wit and satire.

Read "Gulliver's Travels," not a peptonized edition rewritten for children, but Swift's own original, and read Goethe's "Faust," the first part at least. Read also Heine's "Reisebilder," although no translation carries all of Heine's genius.

To know something about yourself and your own kind, read the lives of a few, say a dozen or twenty, of the world's important men; for instance, Socrates, Alexander the Great, Aristotle, Caesar, Napoleon, Voltaire, Michael Angelo, Leonardo Da Vinci. Read the lives of all the authors mentioned above. Look them up in a first-class encyclopedia, if you have no time to do more.

for forty years there are forty Shakespeares waiting for you. The more you know, the more you find in him. His Falstaff is for every age that appreciates wit. His King Lear, written in his late years of bitterness and disappointment, is for the old and the serious. Hamlet is the puzzle and the mental food of every age. His sonnets are the best that the world possesses, as his comedies and tragedies are the best.

There is in Shakespeare mental food for a lifetime. Do not neglect him, whatever else you may neglect. The best brief story of this man who has taught the whole world, and about whom the world knows so little, was written by a Danish Jew, Brandes. Read his "William Shakespeare, a Critical Study."

In books worth reading, which no man can exhaust in one lifetime, you will find happiness, suggestions for the use of power and wealth, if you possess them, consolation in poverty, and strength under all conditions.

To be ignorant is not to be alive, except as the animals live.

And for ignorance there is no necessity, and no excuse except mental dulness.

A college education is not necessary, nothing is necessary except ability to read intelligently and desire to know.

And age makes no difference, except that the untrained mind past forty retains facts with difficulty. But love of knowledge makes up for that.

Among the really learned men of the world the

thirty. For the thinking that you do is the really important part of education, and sound thinking comes after thirty.

If you have not a good education, you can get it at no cost. It is all in the books and inspiration and happiness as well.

Read good books.

Give your children an opportunity in life, if they are brilliant in the ordinary sense of the term, and learn easily; don't force them, hold them back.

If they are called "dull," remember you made them. They did not make themselves. A child can have only what its father and mother give it; if the child seems to be lacking, let the father and mother blame themselves and try to make up in the child's life for that which was lacking in its birth.

FIVE YEARS' WAR

In five years, this stupid earth spent on war, killing and destroying, more than three hundred thousand millions of dollars. If a man spent ten times his yearly revenue in one drunken, murderous debauch, he would have to save and suffer for some time. That is what the world will have to do.

This World is Better

Each day, for millions of years, the beautiful sun has risen upon this continent, or upon the great waste of waters that covered what is a continent today. Each rising of the sun found the earth better, nearer the perfection that is the earth's destiny. What the sun is to this material planet, education, the sun of knowledge and progress, is to the human mind. Its rising drives away clouds, promises the new, better day.

You do not know this earth or its beauty, unless you have seen the sun rise often.

The dark night softens and loses power. The stars, soon to be conquered by the great star nearest to us, grow dim as a greater light approaches. Those other stars, each in its distant spot, tell of the work that is done by light and power on endless millions of planets throughout the infinite universe.

Blackness changes to gray that is almost black. The trees become distinct. The birds wake up and with twittering and fluttering prepare for another day.

Toward the east the sky becomes softer, the light of dawn spreads across the fields, and then come the first rays shooting upward against the round surface of our earth to tell that the great sun is coming.

To the eye and the imagination of man nothing is more impressive than that rising sun, increasing imperceptibly, yet with marvelous speed from the faintest beginning of light to the full splendor of brilliant day.

thirty. For the thinking that you do is the really important part of education, and sound thinking comes after thirty.

If you have not a good education, you can get it at no cost. It is all in the books and inspiration and happiness as well.

Read good books.

Give your children an opportunity in life, if they are brilliant in the ordinary sense of the term, and learn easily; don't force them, hold them back.

If they are called "dull," remember you made them. They did not make themselves. A child can have only what its father and mother give it; if the child seems to be lacking, let the father and mother blame themselves and try to make up in the child's life for that which was lacking in its birth.

FIVE YEARS' WAR

In five years, this stupid earth spent on war, killing and destroying, more than three hundred thousand millions of dollars. If a man spent ten times his yearly revenue in one drunken, murderous debauch, he would have to save and suffer for some time. That is what the world will have to do.

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