o have an acquaintance with a multitude of books, as
with many people; though in either case much time should not be given to
merely pleasant intercourse, that leads to no result. With our literary
friends, we can spend more time, for they awaken keen interest, and are
to be read with zest, and consequently with profit. But for our chosen
intimates, our heart-companions, we reserve our highest regard, and our
best hours. Choice and sacred is the book that makes an era in the life
of the reader; the book which first rouses his higher nature, and awakens
the reason or the imagination. Such a volume will many a one remember;
the book which first excited his own thought, made him conscious of
untried powers, and opened to his charmed vision a new world.

Such a book has Carlyle's Sartor Resartus been to many; or the play of
Hamlet, read for the first time; or the Faust of Goethe; or the
Confessions of St. Augustine; or an essay of Emerson; or John Ruskin; or
the Divine Comedy of Dante; or even an exquisite work of fiction, like
John Halifax, or Henry Esmond. What the book is that works such miracles
is never of so much importance as the epoch in the mind of the reader
which it signalizes. It were vain to single out any one writer, and say
to all readers--"Here is the book that must indispensably be read;" for
the same book will have totally different effects upon different minds,
or even upon the same mind, at different stages of development.

When I have been asked to contribute to the once popular _symposia_ upon
"Books which have helped me,"--I have declined, for such catalogues of
intellectual aids are liable to be very misleading. Thus, if I were to
name the book which did more than most others for my own mind, I should
say that it was the Emile of Rousseau, read at about the age of
seventeen. This work, written with that marvellous eloquence which
characterises all the best productions of Jean Jacques, first brought me
acquainted with those advanced ideas of education which have penetrated
the whole modern world. Yet the Emile would probably appear to most of my
readers trite and common-place, as it would now to me, for the reason
that we have long passed the period of development when its ideas were
new to us.

But the formative power of books can never be over-rated: their subtle
mastery to stimulate all the germs of intellectual and moral life that
lie enfolded in the mind. As the poet sings--

"Books are no