THE LIBRARY—PLEASURE AND PROFIT
We cannot remind ourselves too frequently that a fundamental purpose of good books, and so of the library which possesses them, is to give pleasure, and that the library ought to be more closely and peculiarly associated with pleasure than any other institution supported by the public.
Life for most of us is sufficiently dull and colorless. The workday aspect of the world is always with us and oppresses us. For the average man and woman, whose education has been limited, whose imagination has lacked all wider opportunity for cultivation, the easiest escape from the cares of daily life, from the depressing monotony of daily routine, will be through the avenue opened by the story, the people's road out of a care-filled life, ever since the days of "Arabian Nights." Such readers as these desire fiction and ought to have it. If their imagination can be cultivated to the point of reaching similar freedom from care through poetry, through the drama, or through any of the higher forms of literature, so much the better. The library's message is to men and women cramped by toil and narrowed by routine, ever seeking some way out of this troublesome world into that larger realm which is more truly ours because it is our creation and that of our fellows. This wider world, in its friendliness and homelikeness, the library must represent.
The library is where the readers are introduced to the friendship of authors and their books. There they are at home and there we too may be at home. Old and young, rich and poor, wise and simple, men and women and children, there we may meet new friends on kindly and familiar terms and widen our thoughts as we learn of their wisdom and their wit. Still better, there we may renew our acquaintance with old friends and feel the contracted horizon of our lives again enlarge as we meet them once more. New friends and old, they all greet us with an assured welcome and yield to us the best which they can give, or we receive. We come to them not to learn lessons but to be with them for a little while and to live with them that larger and truer life which their presence creates for us.
Thus the library performs its high and noble duty of helping men to live, "not by bread alone, but by every word of God," who, through good books, has been speaking to the generations of men not only for their instruction but even more for their delight.
E. A. BIRGE.