of nations, the
experience of the world, the achievements and the possibilities of
mankind. It is books that reveal to us ideas and images almost above
ourselves, and go far to open for us the gates of the invisible. "A river
of thought," says Emerson, "is continually flowing out of the invisible
world into the mind of man:" and we may add that books contain the most
fruitful and permanent of the currents of that mighty river.

I am not disposed to celebrate the praises of all books, nor to recommend
to readers of any age a habit of indiscriminate reading: but for the
books which are true helpers and teachers, the thoughts of the best
poets, historians, publicists, philosophers, orators,--if their value is
not real, then there are no realities in the world.

Very true is it, nevertheless, that the many-sided man cannot be
cultivated by books alone. One may learn by heart whole libraries, and
yet be profoundly unacquainted with the face of nature, or the life of
man. The pale student who gives himself wholly to books pays the penalty
by losing that robust energy of character, that sympathy with his kind,
that keen sense of the charms of earth and sky, that are essential to
complete development. "The world's great men," says Oliver Wendell
Holmes, "have not commonly been great scholars, nor its scholars great
men." To know what other men have said about things is not always the
most important part of knowledge. There is nothing that can dispense us
from the independent use of our own faculties. Meditation and observation
are more valuable than mere absorption; and knowledge itself is not
wisdom. The true way to use books is to make them our servants--not our
masters. Very helpful, cheering, and profitable will they become, when
they fall naturally into our daily life and growth--when they tally with
the moods of the mind.

The habits and methods of readers are as various as those of authors.
Thus, there are some readers who gobble a book, as Boswell tells us Dr.
Johnson used to gobble his dinner--eagerly, and with a furious appetite,
suggestive of dyspepsia, and the non-assimilation of food. Then there are
slow readers, who plod along through a book, sentence by sentence,
putting in a mark conscientiously where they left off to-day, so as to
begin at the self-same spot to-morrow; fast readers, who gallop through a
book, as you would ride a flying bicycle on a race; drowsy readers, to
whom a book is only a covert apolog