This collection of addresses given over the years by a revered teacher at Princeton University is an invitation to the humanities in general and a loving description of the values and joys one can find in such writers as Virgil, Spenser, Milton, and Shakespeare. The book represents a plea for study of the liberal arts as an end in itself.
"It holds in essence ... forty years of practice-wrought theory of humanistic teaching and scholarship," comments Osgood. Concerned with the individuality of the student, he asks for a return to the humanistic approach to learning and life in the college classroom and afterwards. He would restore the balance between knowledge (pure facts) and wisdom (the values and beauty offered by great literature), and perhaps even initiate a twentieth-century "renaissance" which would profit from both the lessons of the classics and the accrued knowledge of our modern world.
— from the dust jacket
Table of Contents:
- Ten Thousand Hours
- Paradise Lost for Beginners
- Revival
- Literature and Learning
- An Unfading Country
- The House of Sapience
- The New Poet
- Spenser and Shakespeare
- Areopagitica
- Protective Intelligence
- Rearing Philosophers for Democratic Society
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