ago your letter was delivered me; I take literally the
first free half-hour I have had since to write you a word of answer.

"It would give me true satisfaction could any advice of
mine contribute to forward you in your honourable course of
self-improvement, but a long experience has taught me that advice can
profit but little; that there is a good reason why advice is so seldom
followed; this reason namely, that it is so seldom, and can almost
never be, rightly given. No man knows the state of another; it is
always to some more or less imaginary man that the wisest and most
honest adviser is speaking.

"As to the books which you--whom I know so little of--should read,
there is hardly anything definite that can be said. For one thing, you
may be strenuously advised to keep reading. Any good book, any book
that is wiser than yourself, will teach you something--a great many
things, indirectly and directly, if your mind be open to learn.
This old counsel of Johnson's is also good, and universally
applicable:--'Read the book you do honestly feel a wish and curiosity
to read.' The very wish and curiosity indicates that you, then and
there, are the person likely to get good of it. 'Our wishes are
presentiments of our capabilities;' that is a noble saying, of deep
encouragement to all true men; applicable to our wishes and efforts in
regard to reading as to other things. Among all the objects that look
wonderful or beautiful to you, follow with fresh hope the one which
looks wonderfullest, beautifullest. You will gradually find, by
various trials (which trials see that you make honest, manful ones,
not silly, short, fitful ones), what _is_ for you the wonderfullest,
beautifullest--what is _your_ true element and province, and be able
to profit by that. True desire, the monition of nature, is much to be
attended to. But here, also, you are to discriminate carefully between
_true_ desire and false. The medical men tell us we should eat what
we _truly_ have an appetite for; but what we only _falsely_ have an
appetite for we should resolutely avoid. It is very true; and flimsy,
desultory readers, who fly from foolish book to foolish book, and get
good of none, and mischief of all--are not these as foolish, unhealthy
eaters, who mistake their superficial false desire after spiceries and
confectioneries for their real appetite, of which even they are
not destitute, though it lies far deeper, far quieter, after solid
nutritive foo