"A book may be a perpetual companion. Friends come and go, but the book may beguile all experiences and enchant all hours."
"The first time," says Goldsmith, "that I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend; when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one."
"No matter how poor I am," says William Ellery Channing, "no matter though the prosperous of my own time will not enter my obscure dwelling; if the sacred writers will enter and take up their abode under my roof—if Milton will cross my threshold to sing to me of Paradise; and Shakespeare to open to me the worlds of imagination and the workings of the human heart,—I shall not pine for want of intellectual companionship, though excluded from what is called the best society in the place where I live."
"Books," says Milton, "do preserve as in a violl, the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. A good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm'd and treasur'd up on purpose to a Life beyond Life."
"A book is good company," said Henry Ward Beecher. "It comes to your longing with full instruction, but pursues you never. It is not offended at your absent-mindedness, nor jealous if you turn to other pleasures, of leaf, or dress, or mineral, or even of books. It silently serves the soul without recompense, not even for the hire of love. And yet more noble, it seems to pass from itself, and to enter the memory, and to hover in a silvery transformation there, until the outward book is but a body and its soul and spirit are flown to you, and possess your memory like a spirit."
CHAPTER LXIII
DISCRIMINATION IN READING
A few books well read, and an intelligent choice of those few,—these are the fundamentals for self-education by reading.
If only a few well chosen, it is better to avail yourself of choices others have already made—old books, the standard works tested by many generations of readers. If only a few, let them be books of highest character and established fame. Such books are easily found even in small public libraries.