ensive, not
special; they regard life as a whole, not mental curiosity; they have to
give us, not so much materials, as capacities. So that, however moderate
and limited the opportunity for education, in its way it should be
always more or less symmetrical and balanced, appealing equally in turn
to the three grand intellectual elements--imagination, memory,
reflection: and so having something to give us in poetry, in history, in
science, and in philosophy.

And thus our reading will be sadly one-sided, however voluminous it be,
if it entirely close to us any of the great types and ideals which the
creative instinct of man has produced, if it shut out from us either
the ancient world, or other European poetry, as important almost as our
own. When our reading, however deep, runs wholly into "pockets," and
exhausts itself in the literature of one age, one country, one type,
then we may be sure that it is tending to narrow or deform our minds.
And the more it leads us into curious byways and nurtures us into
indifference for the beaten highways of the world, the sooner we shall
end, if we be not specialists and students by profession, in ceasing to
treat our books as the companions and solace of our lifetime, and in
using them as the instruments of a refined sort of self-indulgence.

A wise education, and so judicious reading, should leave no great type
of thought, no dominant phase of human nature, wholly a blank. Whether
our reading be great or small, so far as it goes, it should be general.
If our lives admit of but a short space for reading, all the more reason
that, so far as may be, it should remind us of the vast expanse of human
thought, and the wonderful variety of human nature. To read, and yet so
to read that we see nothing but a corner of literature, the loose
fringe, or flats and wastes of letters, and by reading only deepen our
natural belief that this island is the hub of the universe, and the
nineteenth century the only age worth notice, all this is really to call
in the aid of books to thicken and harden our untaught prejudices. Be it
imagination, memory, or reflection that we address--that is, in poetry,
history, science, or philosophy, our first duty is to aim at knowing
something at least of the best, at getting some definite idea of the
mighty realm whose outer rim we are permitted to approach.

But how are we to know the best; how are we to gain this definite idea
of the vast world of letters? There