the Understanding' awakened me from stupor, and induced me to form a
resolution to abandon the groveling views I had been accustomed to
maintain." An English tanner, whose leather gained a great reputation,
said he should not have made it so good if he had not read Carlyle. The
lives of Washington and Henry Clay, which Lincoln borrowed from
neighbors in the wilderness, and devoured by the light of the cabin
fire, inspired his life. In his early manhood he read Paine's "Age of
Reason," and Volney's "Ruins," which so influenced his mind that he
wrote an essay to prove the unreliability of the Bible. These two books
nearly unbalanced his moral character. But, fortunately, the books which
fell into his hands in after years corrected this evil influence. The
trend of many a life for good or ill, for success or failure, has been
determined by a single book. The books which we read early in life are
those which influence us most. When Garfield was working for a neighbor
he read "Sinbad the Sailor" and the "Pirate's Own Book." These books
revealed a new world to him, and his mother with difficulty kept him
from going to sea. He was fascinated with the sea life which these books
pictured to his young imagination. The "Voyages of Captain Cook" led
William Carey to go on a mission to the heathen. "The Imitation of
Christ" and Taylor's "Holy Living and Dying" determined the character of
John Wesley. "Shakespeare and the Bible," said John Sharp, "made me
Archbishop of York." The "Vicar of Wakefield" awakened the poetical
genius in Goethe.

"I have been the bosom friend of Leander and Romeo," said Lowell. "I
seem to go behind Shakespeare, and to get my intelligence at first hand.
Sometimes, in my sorrow, a line from Spenser steals in upon my memory as
if by some vitality and external volition of its own, like a blast from
the distant trump of a knight pricking toward the court of Faerie, and I
am straightway lifted out of that sadness and shadow into the sunshine
of a previous and long-agone experience."

"Who gets more enjoyment out of eating," asks Amos R. Wells, "the
pampered millionaire, whose tongue is the wearied host of myriads of
sugary, creamy, spicy guests, or the little daughter of the laborer,
trotting about all the morning with helpful steps, who has come a long
two miles with her father's dinner to eat it with him from a tin pail?
And who gets the more pleasure out of reading, the satiated
fiction-glutton, her brain