digested, will be worth to nine persons out of ten more than
the average collegiate education is to the majority of
graduates.

Our case for knowing the best books is, therefore, not hopeless. What we
need for the achievement is not genius, but only a moderate amount of
forethought and persistence. But who is there that has not tasted the
joy of discovering a great book that seemed written for himself alone?
If there is such a man, he is to be pitied--unless, indeed, he is to be
congratulated on the unimagined pleasure in store for him. Discovery is
not too strong a word for the feeling of the reader when he lights upon
such a world-opening volume. He feels that no one else ever could have
had the same appreciation of it, ever really discovered it, that he is

the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.

Keats, in his glorious sonnet, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer,"
has given the finest of all expressions to this sense of literary
discovery.

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne:
Yet never did I breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher in the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific--and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

To describe such accessions of spiritual vision we turn instinctively to
the narratives of Holy Writ, to Pisgah and its revelation of the
Promised Land, to the ladder at Bethel with its angels ascending and
descending, and to the lonely seer on Patmos with his vision of a new
heaven and a new earth.

But, questions a listener, do books ever really affect people like this?
Most assuredly! We have only to turn to biography for the record, if we
do not find living witnesses among our friends. It was said of Neander
that "Plato is his idol--his constant watchword. He sits day and night
over him; and there are few who have so thoroughly and in such purity
imbibed his wisdom."

The elder Professor Torrey, of the University of Vermont, found his
inspiration, as many another has done, in Dante. In his yout