lf. The
symbol of an ancient man's thought becomes a modern man's speech. Two
thousand summers have imparted to the monuments of Grecian literature,
as to her marbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they
have carried their own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands
to protect them against the corrosion of time. Books are the treasured
wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and
nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and
rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of
their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader
his common sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and
irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or
emperors, exert an influence on mankind. When the illiterate and
perhaps scornful trader has earned by enterprise and industry his
coveted leisure and independence, and is admitted to the circles of
wealth and fashion, he turns inevitably at last to those still higher
but yet inaccessible circles of intellect and genius, and is sensible
only of the imperfection of his culture, and the vanity and
insufficiency of all his riches, and further proves his good sense by
the pains which he takes to secure for his children that intellectual
culture whose want he so keenly feels; and thus it is that he becomes
the founder of a family.

Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the
language in which they were written must have a very imperfect
knowledge of the history of the human race; for it is remarkable that
no transcript of them has ever been made into any modern tongue,
unless our civilization itself may be regarded as such a transcript.
Homer has never yet been printed in English, nor AEschylus, nor Virgil
even--works as refined, as solidly done, and as beautiful almost as
the morning itself; for later writers, say what we will of their
genius, have rarely, if ever, equaled the elaborate beauty and finish
and the lifelong and heroic literary labors of the ancients. They only
talk of forgetting them who never knew them. It will be soon enough to
forget them when we have the learning and the genius which will enable
us to attend to and appreciate them. That age will be rich, indeed,
when those relics which we call classics, and the still older and more
than classic but even less known scriptures of the nations, shall have
still further accumulated, when the Vaticans