crammed with disordered fragments of
countless scenes of adventure, love and tragedy, impatient of the same
old situations, the familiar characters, the stale plots--she or the
girl who is fired with a love for history, say, who wants to know all
about the grand old, queer old Socrates, and then about his friends, and
then about the times in which he lived, and then about the way in which
they all lived, then about the Socratic legacy to the ages? Why, will
that girl ever be done with the feast? Can you not see, looking down on
her joy with a blessing, the very Lord of the banquet, who has ordered
all history and ordained that the truth He fashions shall be stranger
always than the fiction man contrives? Take the word of a man who has
made full trial of both. Solid reading is as much more interesting and
attractive than frivolous reading as solid living is more recreative
than frivolous living."

"I solemnly declare," said Sidney Smith, "that but for the love of
knowledge, I should consider the life of the meanest hedger and ditcher
as preferable to that of the greatest and richest man in existence; for
the fire of our minds is like the fires which the Persians burn in the
mountains, it flames night and day, and is immortal, and not to be
quenched! Upon something it must act and feed--upon the pure spirit of
knowledge, or upon the foul dregs of polluting passions. Therefore, when
I say, in conducting your understanding, love knowledge with a great
love, with a vehement love, with a love co-eval with life--what do I say
but love innocence, love virtue, love purity of conduct, love that
which, if you are rich and great, will vindicate the blind fortune which
has made you so, and make men call it justice; love that which, if you
are poor, will render your poverty respectable, and make the proudest
feel it unjust to laugh at the meanness of your fortunes; love that
which will comfort you, adorn you, and never quit you--which will open
to you the kingdom of thought, and all the boundless regions of
conception, as an asylum against the cruelty, the injustice, and the
pain that may be your lot in the world--that which will make your
motives habitually great and honorable, _and light up in an instant a
thousand noble disdains at the very thought of meanness and of fraud_?"

Do I feel like hearing an eloquent sermon? Spurgeon and Beecher,
Whitefield, Hall, Collyer, Phillips Brooks, Canon Farrar, Dr. Parker,
Talmage, are all sta