Macaulay had wealth and fame, rank and power, and yet he tells us in his biography that he owed the happiest hours of his life to books. In a charming letter to a little girl he says: “Thank you for your very pretty letter. I am always glad to make my little girl happy, and nothing pleases me so much as to see that she likes books, for when she is as old as I am she will find that they are better than all the tarts and cakes, toys and plays, and sights in the world. If any one would make me the greatest king that ever lived, with palaces and gardens and fine dinners, and wines and coaches, and beautiful clothes, and hundreds of servants, on condition that I should not read books, I would not be a king. I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love reading.”
Books, indeed, endow us with a whole enchanted palace of thoughts. There is a wider prospect, says Jean Paul Richter, from Parnassus than from the throne. In one way they give us an even more vivid idea than the actual reality, just as reflections are often more beautiful than real nature. All mirrors, says George MacDonald, “are magic mirrors. The commonest room is a room in a poem when I look in the glass.”
English literature is the birthright and inheritance of the English race. We have produced and are producing some of the greatest of poets, of philosophers, of men of science. No race can boast a brighter, purer, or nobler literature—richer than our commerce, more powerful than our arms. It is the true pride and glory of our country, and for it we cannot be too thankful.
Precious and priceless are the blessings which the books scatter around our daily paths. We walk, in imagination, with the noblest spirits, through the most sublime and enchanting regions,—regions which, to all that is lovely in the forms and colors of earth,
“Add the gleam,
The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration and the poet’s dream.”
Without stirring from our firesides we may roam to the most remote regions of the earth, or soar into realms where Spenser’s shapes of unearthly beauty flock to meet us, where Milton’s angels peal in our ears the choral hymns of Paradise. Science, art, literature, philosophy,—all that man has thought, all that man has done,—the experience that has been bought with the sufferings of a hundred generations,—all are garnered up for us in the world of books.
From “The Use of Life.”
BREAK, BREAK, BREAK.
ALFRED TENNYSON.
For a sketch of the life of Tennyson, see Book V, page 102.