that is
pleasanter than the sunshine outdoors. The deathlike stillness and
tomblike hush, the sepulchral gloom, the graveyard silence that
sometimes prevails in libraries, should not be encouraged. Make people
feel at home. The library here can learn a good lesson from the barroom.
There are no signs up in a barroom intimating that loud talking is not
allowed, nobody walks on tiptoes, everybody is welcomed heartily and
encouraged to stay, and men find a sympathetic friendliness there who
find it nowhere else. John Wesley said we should not allow the devil to
monopolize all the good tunes. The library should not allow the barroom
to monopolize all the spirit of human friendliness and good cheer. I am
sincerely glad that the old type of librarian is passing out--a man so
dignified that children were afraid of him, whose face was so long that
his chin dragged on the floor. We want human men with blood in them in a
library; men who like men and love children; men who can make themselves
agreeable to men, women, children, and dogs. Let us make life as
pleasant in a library as a mother's twilight hour with her children, and
we shall raise up great families for the afterdays, who shall look back
upon us as their intellectual parents, and rise up after we are gone and
call our memories blessed.

There are three classes of books--books that give pleasure, books that
give information, and books that give inspiration. The first class has
its thousands of readers, the second its hundreds, and the third its
tens. It is a good thing to read books for pleasure--it is the most
innocent kind of drunkenness I know about; but that reading books merely
for pleasure may develop into a kind of intellectual dissipation is
something that we know from experience; for who is there of us who has
not sinned? But reading books merely for pleasure is something we should
outgrow in childhood, just as we do stilts and marbles and the game of
tag. It is a better thing to read books for information. It is one of
the healthiest joys of the normal mind to be forever learning something;
forever learning and forever coming to the knowledge of the truth. It is
the best thing, however, to read books for inspiration. And this is a
class of readers into which many of the frequenters of the public
libraries never graduate. Ah! the pity of it! Books that lift us out of
ourselves and the fogs and fumes and dust of our little treadmill
routines into the ampler eth