Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 02

This is not a book in the modern sense. It is a portal. Volume Two of a landmark Victorian anthology that attempted to gather 'the world's best literature' into American households, spanning three millennia and continents. Here, ancient Mesopotamian hymns to the god Zu sit beside letters from Abigail Adams to her niece, John Quincy Adams' Fourth of July orations share pages with the melancholic fragments of Greek lyricist Anacreon, and Hans Christian Andersen's 'The Steadfast Tin Soldier' precedes philosophical musings from Swiss poet Henri Frédéric Amiel on music and the human condition. The editors included transliterations from Akkadian, correspondence between twelfth-century lovers Abelard and Heloise, and the political writings of three generations of American Adams men. What emerges is not just literature, but a snapshot of what late nineteenth-century editors considered essential: a strange, magnificent, sometimes baffling canon that reveals as much about the collectors as the collected. For readers curious about how literature's boundaries were once drawn, and what treasures lie in the archives of old ambitions.