worth. In youth "Hamlet" is to us the greatest of all plays;
in old age, "Lear." I know of no more interesting account of the
development of a mind in the choice of books than that presented in John
Beattie Crozier's autobiographical volume entitled "My Inner Life." The
author is an English philosopher, who was born and lived until manhood
in the backwoods of Canada. He tells us how as a young man groping about
for some clew to the mystery of the world in which he found himself, he
tried one great writer after another--Mill, Buckle, Carlyle,
Emerson--all to no purpose, for he was not ready for them. At this
period he read with great profit the "Recreations of a Country Parson,"
which, as he says, "gave me precisely the grade and shade of platitude I
required." But more important were the weekly sermons of Henry Ward
Beecher. Of him Crozier says:

For years his printed sermons were the main source of my
instruction and delight. His range and variety of
observation ... his width of sympathy; his natural and
spontaneous pathos; the wealth of illustration and metaphor
with which his sermons were adorned, and which were drawn
chiefly from natural objects, from his orchard, his farm,
his garden, as well as from machinery and from all kinds of
natural processes; his naturalism and absence of theological
bias; his knowledge of average men and their ways of looking
at things; in a word, his general fertility of thought,
filling up, as it did, the full horizon of my mind, and
running over and beyond it on all sides, so that wherever I
looked he had been there before me--all this delighted and
enchanted me, and made him for some years my ideal of
intellectual greatness; and I looked forward to the
Saturdays on which his weekly sermons reached me with
longing and pure joy.

Later, in England, Crozier took up the works of the philosophers with
better success. The chapter of most interest for us is the one on the
group which he calls "The Poetic Thinkers"--Carlyle, Newman, Emerson,
Goethe. Of these he places Goethe and Emerson highest. Indeed of
Emerson's essay on "Experience" he says:

In this simple framework Emerson has contrived to work in
thoughts on human life more central and commanding, more
ultimate and final, and of more universal application than
are to be found within the same compass in the literature of
any