Excerpt from Half-Hours With the Best Foreign Authors, Vol. 1
While the literature of the English language is, in variety of subject, clearness and beauty of style, and depth of thought, of the highest merit, it is very far from embracing all the valuable literature of the earth, nor can any one attain an extended literary cultivation who devotes himself to it alone. Within the locked casket of the foreign languages there lies hidden a rich treasure of human thought, some acquaintance with which is indispensable to all who desire to gain even a general knowledge of the names and productions of the great thinkers of the world. Yet few of us, in this rushing nineteenth century, with its incessant demands upon our attention, have time to learn to road even one foreign language with fluency, while rare are they who can read all the literary languages with clear appreciation. Fortunately, the best of the literature of those languages has been converted into excellent English prose and verse by the labor of numerous able translators, many of them themselves authors of high merit and not infrequently surpassing in literary skill the writers whose works they translate. The ideas of foreign author's, the souls of their books, are given us by these translators in as clear and comprehensible language as that in which they were originally written, often, indeed, much more so, and there is no great thought extant in the world that cannot be converted into intelligible English.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге Half-Hours With the Best Foreign Authors, Vol. 1 (Classic Reprint) (Charles Morris)