The value of a book consists not in what it will do for one’s amusement, but for one’s edification. Boys are generally more easily persuaded to read fictitious books because there is something captivating about them. Some had better not be read, while others which are amusing may be helpful. Abbot’s Histories, Scribner’s “Library of Wonder,” and “Library of Travel,” “Aesop’s Fables,” “Robinson Crusoe,” “Peasant and Prince,” “The Tale of Two Brothers,” “Paul and Virginia,” “The Vicar of Wakefield,” Scott’s “Tales of a Grandfather,” the Indian tales of Fenimore Cooper, the fascinating character stories of Dickens, and many others, are all suitable to read. They will stimulate the fancy, enlarge the sympathies and improve the taste.
There are biographies of great and noble men. They will arouse the spirit, instruct the mind and influence the life. “The good life,” says George Herbert, “is never out of season.” Every boy should read such lives as Washington, Lincoln, Grant, and the lives of great statesmen, lawyers, poets and ministers.
Nothing will give a clearer insight of the past with its events and characters, manners and law, trades and industries, modes of government and conditions of people than history. A few good histories like Thalheimer’s “Manual of Ancient History,” Macaulay’s “History of the World,” Gibbon’s magnificent drama of the “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” and Ridpath’s “History of the United States,” bring all the world with its pleasures and sufferings and everything inspired with living reality before us.
Then there is poetry. The world’s highest wisdom, its profoundest truths and its best philosophy appear in poetic language. Leigh Hunt said, “It is the breath of beauty, flowing around the spiritual world, as the winds that wake up the flowers do about the material.” Plato asserts that “poetry comes nearer the vital truth than history.” Scarcely do we find a volume of impure stanzas. “Only that is poetry which cleanses and mans me,” wrote Emerson. Milton is said to have regarded himself as inspired in the conception and production of “Paradise Lost” and “Paradise Regained.” The poet Cowper was a man with consecrated heart. His epitaph reads: “His virtues formed the magic of his song.” Wordsworth’s poems are medicine. Bryant interprets nature in her loftiest thoughts and feelings. Longfellow speaks for the holiest affections. Whittier sounds the bugle charges against every wrong, waking the memory of happy olden days with their attendant, familiar faces. Holmes bubbles over with humor and laughter. All these and many more become our best friends and teachers. There is also the philosophical, which every boy should grapple—Locke’s “Human Understanding,” Porter’s “Intellectual Science,” and Haven’s “Ancient and Modern Philosophy.” Grapple with scientific books, such as Hugh Miller’s Geology, Johnson’s “Chemistry of Common Life.” In fact, in the language of Tulloch, “Whether you read history or poetry, science or theology, or even fiction of a worthy kind, it will prove a mental discipline and bring increase of wisdom.”
HOW SHALL I READ?
“Read not,” says Bacon, “to contradict and confront, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.” Carlyle expressed the same thought when he said, “Pursue your studies in the way your conscience calls honest. More and more endeavor to do that.” Read with care, not with a half-mechanical glancing over the pages as we would look over a map or listen to the instructor while the mind is playing hide-and-seek with floating daydreams. Read with regularity. Have a definite time if possible, when no one will be likely to obtrude. Select some line of knowledge both interesting and useful, and read with the intention of acquiring a thorough understanding of it. When finishing a chapter, take a mental review and if not able to give an outline of it, read it over again. By so doing, one cultivates a retentive memory. Should anything of importance present itself, underline it. Sir William Hamilton underscored. Cardinal Newman wrote in the margin of his books a statement of his own views upon the paragraph he read. Gladstone always read with pencil in hand, marking on the margin those passages he wished to remember, questioning those about which he was in doubt, and putting a cross opposite those he disputed. In reading, use a dictionary to aid in pronouncing and defining large or unknown words. If possible, read aloud. It aids enunciation and leads to a mastery of inflection. Above all, make it your business, my boy, to extract the honey from what you read. Read for mental sustenance. Read so as to know how to live, speak and act, or read not at all.
An old pilot was once asked if he knew where all the rocks were along the line of travel. There is a world of wisdom in his answer: “I do not need to know where all the rocks are; it is enough for me to know where the rocks are not, and keep in the free channel.” By reading good books one avoids those dangers to morals which lurk in so much of the literature of the day. By it, he becomes wiser, happier, nobler, esteeming the words and thoughts of those whose presence may never more be appreciated by mortal man. Though dead, they yet speak.
CHAPTER XIX
Be Attentive to Details
INTRODUCTION TO CHAPTER XIX
By Lyman J. Gage