Chapter 8

) but it ought to be emphasised that, for the investor in literature, they hold a position quite as enviable and altogether desirable as does the class of securities known as municipals for the investor of moneys. Time will not match for us a book like Booker T. Washington’s _Up From Slavery_, nor will literature furnish us with a more strangely suggestive career than that related in Raymond Weaver’s _Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic_. It was C. Alphonso Smith’s _O. Henry Biography_ that first gave the world the facts on which to base a true understanding of that extraordinary writer. The tale of unwearied courage in Edward Livingston Trudeau’s _Autobiography_ cannot lose either its freshness nor its strength of inspiration. To read P. P. Howe’s _Life of William Hazlitt_ and then to turn to his little book of selections called _The Best of Hazlitt_ is to enter into a permanently valuable share of the English literary inheritance. _The Letters of Henry James_, selected and edited by Percy Lubbock, and James’s own _Notes of a Son and Brother_; Sir Sidney Colvin’s _John Keats_ and his _Memories and Notes of Persons and Places_; the _Letters of James Huneker_ and Huneker’s autobiography, _Steeplejack_; and the _Letters and Papers of John Addington Symonds_, edited by Horatio F. Brown, are all of the class of books whose content is a permanent acquisition, an actual “property” of which the reader, in legal language, becomes seized and possessed.

One’s investment in an ample author should be allowed to ramify in all directions natural to the lines of human interest. About Walt Whitman, for example, there is by now a cluster of books which the reader of _Leaves of Grass_ or of Whitman’s prose cannot afford, in their entirety, to neglect. Whether he will want one or all, or what ones he will want, will depend upon the relation he establishes with Whitman himself. The best brief biography is _Walt Whitman: The Man and His Work_, translated from the French of Leon Bazalgette by Ellen FitzGerald. Personally I do not think one can feel himself acquainted with Whitman unless he has read, or read in, the three massive volumes of Horace Traubel’s _With Walt Whitman in Camden_. _The Letters of Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman_, edited by Thomas B. Harned, form an unusual and engrossing chapter in the lives of both. Those keenly interested will explore further yet in the two volumes of the _Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman_, edited by Emory Holloway, who is now at work on a long and comprehensive biography of the poet.

The book with beautiful illustrations is a true investment, since now such illustrations are seldom if ever wasted on a second-rate text. To a great extent these illustrated books are ones appreciable by children as well as by their elders--things like _Westward Ho!_ and _The Last of the Mohicans_--and came up for our consideration in