"All that mankind has done, thought or been is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books. They are the chosen possession of men."—Carlyle.
"We need to be reminded every day how many are the books of inimitable glory, which, with all our eagerness after reading, we have never taken into our hands. It will astonish most of us to find how much of our very industry is given to the books which have no worth, how often we rake in the litter of the printing press, whilst a crown of gold and rubies is offered us in vain."—F. Harrison.
XI
The Uses of Books and Reading[ToC]
Paul was at once a thinker, a theologian, and a statesman, because he was always a scholar. One duty he never neglected—the duty of self-culture through reading. Certain companions were ever with him—his favorite authors. Imprisoned in Rome, the burden of his letters to his young friend in Ephesus was books and the duty of reading. Himself a Hebrew, by much study he became a cosmopolitan and a citizen of the wide-lying universe. Like Emerson, he believed that "the scholar was a favorite of heaven and earth, the excellency of his country, and the happiest of men." Saner intellect than his never trod this earth, and could he speak to our age, with its fret and fever, his message would certainly include some words about the companionship of good books.
The supreme privilege of our generation is not rapid transit, nor the increase of comforts and luxuries. Modern civilization hath its flower and fruitage in books and culture for all through reading. Should the dream of the astronomer ever come true, and science establish a code of electric signals with the people of Mars, our first message would not be about engines, nor looms, nor steamships. Not the telephone by which men speak across continents, but the book by which living men and dead men converse across centuries, would be the burden of the first message. President Porter once said that the savage visiting London with Livingstone appreciated everything except the libraries. The poor black man understood the gallery, for the face of his child answered to that of Raphael's cherub and seraph. He understood the cathedral, with its aisles and arches, for it reminded him of his own altars and funeral hymns. He understood the city, for it seemed like many little towns brought together in one. But the great library, crowded from floor to ceiling with books, the strange, white pages over which bowed the reader, while smiles flitted across his face as one sun-spot chases another over the warm April hills, the black marks causing the reader's tears to flow down upon the open page, made up a mystery the poor savage could not understand. No explanation availed for the necromancy of the library.
For wise men the joys of reading are life's crowning pleasures. Books are our universities, where souls are the professors. Books are the looms that weave rapidly man's inner garments. Books are the levelers—not by lowering the great, but by lifting up the small. A book literally fulfills the story of the Wandering Jew, who sits down by our side and like a familiar friend tells us what he hath seen and heard through twenty centuries of traveling through Europe. Newton's "Principia" means that at last stars and suns have broken into voice. Agassiz's zoölogy causes each youth to be a veritable Noah, to whom it is given to behold all insects and beasts and birds going two by two into the world's great ark. God hath given us four inferior teachers, including travel, occupation, industry, conversation, and four teachers superior, including love, grief, death—but chiefly books.