Excerpt from Poems From the Works of William Cullen Bryant

"Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruptions, fenced by etiquette, but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age." - Ralph Waldo Emerson.

How can our young people be led to take pleasure in the writings of our best authors?

An attempt to answer this important inquiry is the aim of these Leaflets. It is proposed, by their use in the school and the family, to develop a love for the beautiful thoughts, the noble and elevating sentiments, that pervade the choicest literature, and thus to turn aside that flood of pernicious reading which is deluging the children of our beloved country. It is hoped that they will prove effective instruments in securing the desired end, and an aid in the attainment of a higher mental and moral culture.

Our best writers, intelligent teachers, and lecturers on literary subjects, have given suggestions and material for this work, and rendered its realization possible. Those who, knowing the power of a good thought well expressed, have endeavored to popularize works of acknowledged merit by means of copied extracts, marked passages, leaves torn from books, and other expensive and time-consuming expedients, will gladly welcome this new, convenient, and inexpensive arrangement of appropriate selections as helps to the progress they are attempting to secure. This plan and the selections used are the outgrowth of experience in the school-room, and their utility and adaptation to the proposed aims have been proved. By means of these sheets, each teacher can have at command a larger range of authors than is otherwise possible. A few suggestions in regard to these Leaflets may not be amiss:

1. They may be used for sight-reading and silent reading.

2. They may be employed for analysis of the author's meaning and language, which may well be made a prominent feature of the reading-lesson, as it is the best preparation for a proper rendering of the passages given.

3. They may he distributed, that each pupil may spend any spare time in choosing his own favorite selection. This may afterward be used, as its character or the pupil's inclination suggests, for sentiment, essay, reading, recitation, or declamation.

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