Such recitation is useless so far as the thought in the song is concerned. No time was saved in these instances by omitting the individual recitation. Individual mastery of the selection should precede any exercise in concert reading.
It is one thing to own a library; it is, however, another to use it wisely. If I were to pray for a taste which should stand me in stead under every variety of circumstances, and be a source of happiness and cheerfulness to me through life, and a shield against its ills, however things might go amiss and the world frown upon me, it would be a taste for reading. I speak of it, of course, only as a worldly advantage, and not in the slightest degree superseding or derogating from the higher office, and surer and stronger panoply of religious principles—but as a taste, an instrument, and a mode of pleasurable gratification. Give a man this taste and the means of gratifying it, and you can hardly fail of making a happy man.
—Sir John Herschel.
CHAPTER XI.
THE USE OF THE LIBRARY.
In my garden I spend my days, in my library I spend my nights. My interests are divided between my geraniums and my books. With the flowers I am in the present; with the books I am in the past. I go into my library and all history unrolls before me. I breathe the morning air of the world while the scent of Eden’s roses yet lingered in it, while it vibrated only to the world’s first brood of nightingales and to the laugh of Eve.
I see the pyramids building; I hear the shoutings of the armies of Alexander; I feel the ground shake beneath the march of Cambyses. I sit as in a theatre; the stage is Time, the play is the World. What a spectacle it is! What kingly pomp, what processions, file past; what cities burn to heaven, what crowds of captives are carried at the chariot wheels of conquerors! I hear or cry, “Bravo!” when the great actors come on, shaking the stage. I am a Roman emperor when I look at a Roman coin. I lift old Homer, and I shout Achilles in the trenches. The silence of the empeopled Syrian plains, the outcomings and ingoings of the patriarchs, Abraham and Ishmael, Isaac in the fields at eventide, Rebekah at the well, Jacob’s guile, Esau’s face reddened by the desert sunheat, Joseph’s splendid funeral procession—all these things I find within the boards of my Old Testament.