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EIGHTH READER

Hearty Reading

BY SYDNEY SMITH

Sydney Smith (1771-1845): An English clergyman and author. He published some volumes of sermons characterized by earnestness and moderation, but his reputation rests chiefly on his miscellaneous and critical writings. He was distinguished for his wit, humor, and conversational powers.

This advice about reading is taken from a "Lecture on the Conduct of the Understanding."

Curiosity is a passion very favorable to the love of study, and a passion very susceptible of increase by cultivation. Sound travels so many feet in a second, and light travels so many feet in a second. Nothing more probable; but you do not care how light and sound travel. Very likely: 5 but make yourself care; get up, shake yourself well, pretend to care, make believe to care, and very soon you will care, and care so much that you will sit for hours thinking about light and sound, and be extremely angry with any one who interrupts you in your pursuits, and tolerate no 10 other conversation but about light and sound, and catch yourself plaguing everybody to death who approaches you with the discussion of these subjects.

I am sure that a man ought to read as he would grasp a nettle: do it lightly, and you get molested; grasp it 15 with all your strength and you feel none of its asperities. There is nothing so horrible as languid study; when you sit looking at the clock, wishing the time was over or that somebody would call on you and put you out of your missery. The only way to read with any efficacy is to read so heartily that dinner-time comes two hours before you expected it.

To sit with your Livy before you, and hear the geese cackling that saved the Capitol; and to see with your 10 own eyes the Carthaginian sutlers gathering up the rings of the Roman knights after the battle of Cannæ and heaping them into bushels; and to be so intimately present at the actions you are reading of that when anybody knocks at the door it will take you two or three seconds to deter15 mine whether you are in your own study, or in the plains of Lombardy, looking at Hannibal's weather-beaten face, and admiring the splendor of his single eye, - this is the only kind of study which is not tiresome, and almost the only kind which is not useless; this is the knowledge which 20 gets into the system and which a man carries about and uses like his limbs, without perceiving that it is extraneous, weighty, or inconvenient.

As pěr'i ties: roughnesses; severities. Titus Liv'ў (59 в.с.18 A.D.): a Roman historian. Consult a history of Rome for an account of how the sacred geese saved the Capitol from the Gauls, of the battle of Can'næ, in which the Romans were defeated by the Car tha gin'i ans, and of Han'ni bal (248-183 B.c.), the great Carthaginian general. Sut'lers: persons who follow an army and sell provisions to the soldiers. Éx tra'něoŭs: not essential; foreign.

The Coming of Arthur

BY ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892): An English poet from whose writings a number of selections have been given in earlier books of this series. This selection is a part of the poem entitled, "The Coming of Arthur," the first of the series of poems comprising Tennyson's great epic, "The Idylls of the King."

Arthur, lately made king, had sent to King Leodogran asking his daughter Guinevere in marriage. Leodogran consulted Queen Bellicent as to Arthur's kingship. This extract gives her answer.

"Bleys, our Merlin's master, as they say,
Died but of late, and sent his cry to me,
To hear him speak before he left his life.
Shrunk like a fairy changeling lay the mage ;
And when I entered told me that himself
And Merlin ever served about the king,
Uther, before he died; and on the night
When Uther in Tintagil passed away
Moaning and wailing for an heir, the two
Left the still king, and passing forth to breathe,
Then from the castle gateway by the chasm
Descending through the dismal night - a night
In which the bounds of heaven and earth were lost
Beheld, so high upon the dreary deeps

It seemed in heaven, a ship, the shape thereof
A dragon winged, and all from stem to stern
Bright with a shining people on the decks,
And gone as soon as seen. And then the two
Dropped to the cove and watched the great sea fall,

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Wave after wave each mightier than the last,
Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep
And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged
Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame:

5 And down the wave and in the flame was borne
A naked babe, and rode to Merlin's feet,
Who stooped and caught the babe, and cried, The king!
Here is an heir for Uther!' And the fringe
Of that great breaker, sweeping up the strand,
10 Lashed at the wizard as he spake the word,
And all at once all round him rose in fire,
So that the child and he were clothed in fire.
And presently thereafter followed calm,

Free sky and stars: 'And this same child,' he said,
15 Is he who reigns; nor could I part in peace
Till this were told.' And saying this the seer
Went through the strait and dreadful pass of death,
Not ever to be questioned any more

Save on the further side; but when I met

20 Merlin, and asked him if these things were truth
The shining dragon and the naked child
Descending in the glory of the seas -
He laughed as is his wont, and answered me
In riddling triplets of old time, and said:

25 "Rain, rain, and sun! a rainbow in the sky!
A young man will be wiser by and by;
An old man's wit may wander ere he die.

""Rain, rain, and sun! a rainbow on the lea !
And truth is this to me, and that to thee;
30 And truth or clothed or naked let it be.

"Rain, sun, and rain! and the free blossom blows : Sun, rain, and sun! and where is he who knows? From the great deep to the great deep he goes.'

"So Merlin riddling angered me; but thou
Fear not to give this king thine only child,
Guinevere; so great bards of him will sing
Hereafter; and dark sayings from of old
Ranging and ringing through the minds of men,
And echoed by old folk beside their fires

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For comfort after their wage-work is done,
Speak of the king; and Merlin in our time

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Hath spoken also, not in jest, and sworn

Though men may wound him that he will not die,
But pass, again to come; and then or now
Utterly smite the heathen underfoot,
Till these and all men hail him for their king."

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She spake and King Leodogran rejoiced,
But musing, "Shall I answer yea or nay?”
Doubted, and drowsed, nodded and slept, and saw,

Dreaming, a slope of land that ever grew,

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Field after field, up to a height, the peak
Haze-hidden, and thereon a phantom king
Now looming and now lost; and on the slope
The sword rose, the hind fell, the herd was driven,
Fire glimpsed; and all the land from roof and rick, 25
In drifts of smoke before a rolling wind,
Streamed to the peak, and mingled with the haze
And made it thicker; while the phantom king
Sent out at times a voice; and here or there
Stood one who pointed toward the voice, the rest

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