in Rome, the burden of his
letters to his young friend in Ephesus was books and the duty of
reading. Himself a Hebrew, by much study he became a cosmopolitan and
a citizen of the wide-lying universe. Like Emerson, he believed that
"the scholar was a favorite of heaven and earth, the excellency of his
country, and the happiest of men." Saner intellect than his never trod
this earth, and could he speak to our age, with its fret and fever,
his message would certainly include some words about the companionship
of good books.

The supreme privilege of our generation is not rapid transit, nor the
increase of comforts and luxuries. Modern civilization hath its flower
and fruitage in books and culture for all through reading. Should the
dream of the astronomer ever come true, and science establish a code
of electric signals with the people of Mars, our first message would
not be about engines, nor looms, nor steamships. Not the telephone by
which men speak across continents, but the book by which living men
and dead men converse across centuries, would be the burden of the
first message. President Porter once said that the savage visiting
London with Livingstone appreciated everything except the libraries.
The poor black man understood the gallery, for the face of his child
answered to that of Raphael's cherub and seraph. He understood the
cathedral, with its aisles and arches, for it reminded him of his own
altars and funeral hymns. He understood the city, for it seemed like
many little towns brought together in one. But the great library,
crowded from floor to ceiling with books, the strange, white pages
over which bowed the reader, while smiles flitted across his face as
one sun-spot chases another over the warm April hills, the black marks
causing the reader's tears to flow down upon the open page, made up a
mystery the poor savage could not understand. No explanation availed
for the necromancy of the library.

For wise men the joys of reading are life's crowning pleasures. Books
are our universities, where souls are the professors. Books are the
looms that weave rapidly man's inner garments. Books are the
levelers--not by lowering the great, but by lifting up the small. A
book literally fulfills the story of the Wandering Jew, who sits down
by our side and like a familiar friend tells us what he hath seen and
heard through twenty centuries of traveling through Europe. Newton's
"Principia" means that at last stars and sun