does well to keep
always before his eyes, and which represent the wisdom of many
generations of studious experience. You may have often heard from
others, or may have found out, how good it is to have on your shelves,
however scantily furnished they may be, three or four of those books
to which it is well to give ten minutes every morning, before going
down into the battle and choking dust of the day. Men will name these
books for themselves. One will choose the Bible, another Goethe, one
the _Imitation of Christ_, another Wordsworth. Perhaps it matters
little what it be, so long as your writer has cheerful seriousness,
elevation, calm, and, above all, a sense of size and strength, which
shall open out the day before you and bestow gifts of fortitude and
mastery.

Then, to turn to the intellectual side. You know as well as I or any
one can tell you, that knowledge is worth little until you have made
it so perfectly your own, as to be capable of reproducing it in
precise and definite form. Goethe said that in the end we only retain
of our studies, after all, what we practically employ of them. And it
is at least well that in our serious studies we should have the
possibility of practically turning them to a definite destination
clearly before our eyes. Nobody can be sure that he has got clear
ideas on a subject, unless he has tried to put them down on a piece of
paper in independent words of his own. It is an excellent plan, too,
when you have read a good book, to sit down and write a short abstract
of what you can remember of it. It is a still better plan, if you can
make up your minds to a slight extra labour, to do what Lord
Strafford, and Gibbon, and Daniel Webster did. After glancing over the
title, subject, or design of a book, these eminent men would take a
pen and write roughly what questions they expected to find answered in
it, what difficulties solved, what kind of information imparted. Such
practices keep us from reading with the eye only, gliding vaguely over
the page; and they help us to _place_ our new acquisitions in relation
with what we knew before. It is almost always worth while to read a
thing twice over, to make sure that nothing has been missed or
dropped on the way, or wrongly conceived or interpreted. And if the
subject be serious, it is often well to let an interval elapse. Ideas,
relations, statements of fact, are not to be taken by storm. We have
to steep them in the mind, in the hope of thu