A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

	Adam scriveyn, if ever it thee bifalle
	Boece or Troilus to wryten newe,
	Under thy lokkes thou most have the scalle,
	But after my making thou wryte trewe.
	So ofte a daye I mot thy werk renewe,
	Hit to correcte and eek to rubbe and scrape;
	And al it through thy negligence and rape.

	Say worthy doctors and Clerkes curious:
	What moveth you of Bokes to have such a number,
	Syn divers doctrines through way contrarious
	Doth mans minde distract and sore encomber;
	Alas, blind men awake, out of your slomber,
	And if ye will needs your books multiply
	With diligence endeavour you some to occupy.

	Give me leave
	To enjoy myself; that place that does contain
	My books, the best companions, is to me
	A glorious court, where hourly I converse
	With the old sages and philosophers;
	And sometimes, for variety, I confer
	With kings and emperors, and weigh their counsels;
	Calling their victories, if unjustly got,
	Unto a strict account, and, in my fancy,
	Deface their ill-placed statues. Can I then
	Part with such constant pleasures, to embrace
	Uncertain vanities? No, be it your care
	To augment your heap of wealth; it shall be mine
	To increase in knowledge.—Lights there, for my study!

  As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.

  Books are the depositary of every thing that is most honourable to man. Literature, taken in all its bearings, forms the grand line of demarcation between the human and the animal kingdoms. He that loves reading, has every thing within his reach. He has but to desire; and he may possess himself of every species of wisdom to judge, and power to perform.

  At no hour of your life will the love of letters ever oppress you as a burden, or fail you as resource. In the vain and foolish exultation of the heart, which the brighter prospects of life will sometimes excite, the pensive portress of science shall call you to the sober pleasures of her holy cell. In the mortifications of disappointment, her soothing voice shall whisper serenity and peace. In social converse with the mighty dead of ancient days, you will never smart under the galling sensation of dependence upon the mighty living of the present age; and in your struggles with the world, should a crisis ever occur, when even friendship may deem it prudent to desert you; when even your country may seem ready to abandon herself and you; when, even priest and levite shall come and look on you, and pass by on the other side; seek refuge, my unfailing friends, and be assured you will find it, in the friendships of Lælius and Scipio; in the patriotism of Cicero, Demosthenes, and Burke; as well as in the precepts and example of Him, whose law is love, and who taught us to remember injuries only to forgive them.

  We can select our companions from among the most richly gifted of the sons of God, and they are companions who will not desert us in poverty, or sickness, or disgrace; when everything else fails,—when fortune frowns, and friends cool, and health forsakes us,—when this great world of forms and shows appears a “two-edged lie, which seems but is not,”—when all our earth-clinging hopes and ambitions melt away into nothingness,

	“Like snow-falls on a river,
	One moment white, then gone forever,”—

we are still not without friends to animate and console us,—friends, in whose immortal countenances, as they look out upon us from books, we can discern no change; who will dignify low fortunes and humble life with their kingly presence; who will people solitude with shapes more glorious than ever glittered in palaces; who will consecrate sorrow and take the sting from care; and who, in the long hours of despondency and weakness, will send healing to the sick heart, and energy to the wasted brain.

  In that great social organ which, collectively, we call literature, there may be distinguished two separate offices that may blend, and often do so, but capable, severally, of a severe insulation, and naturally fitted for a reciprocal repulsion. There is, first, the literature of knowledge; and, secondly, the literature of power. The function of the first is—to teach; the function of the second is—to move: the first is a rudder; the second, an oar or a sail. The first speaks to the mere discursive understanding; the second speaks ultimately, it may happen, to the higher understanding or reason, but always through affections of pleasure and sympathy.

  It is the relation to universal humanity which constitutes literature; it matters not how elevated, whether it be history, philosophy, or poetry, in its highest aspirations; or how humble, it may be the simplest rhyme or story that is level to the unquestioning faith and untutored intellect of childhood: let it but be addressed to our common human nature, it is literature in the true sense of the term.

  Words afford a more delicious music than the chords of any instrument; they are susceptible of richer colors than any painter’s palette; and that they should be used merely for the transportation of intelligence, as a wheelbarrow carries brick, is not enough. The highest aspect of literature assimilates it to painting and music. Beyond and above all the domain of use lies beauty, and to aim at this makes literature an art.

  When the conceptions of an individual mind are expressed in a permanent form of words, we get literature. The sum total of all the permanent forms of expression in one language make up the literature of that language; and if no one has given his conceptions a form which has been preserved, the language is without a literature. There are then two things essential to a literary work: first, the conceptions of an individual mind; second, a permanent form of expression. Hence it follows that the domain of literature is distinct from the domain of natural or mathematical science. Science does not give us the conceptions of an individual mind, but it tells us what every rational person who studies the subject must think. And science is entirely independent of any form of words: a proposition of Euclid is science; a sonnet of Wordsworth’s is literature…. So great is the difference between science and literature, that in literature, as the first Lord Lytton said, the best books are generally the oldest; in science they are the newest.

  We may aver with confidence, that English literature furnishes the amplest, the most varied, and the most interesting materials for the critic, of any whether ancient or modern.

  Literature is the greatest of all sources of refined pleasure.

  What is your first remark on turning over the great, stiff leaves of a folio, the yellow sheets of a manuscript,—a poem, a code of laws, a declaration of faith? This, you say, was not created alone. It is but a mould, like a fossil shell, an imprint, like one of those shapes embossed in stone by an animal, which lived and perished. Under the shell there was an animal, and behind the document there was a man. Why do you study the shell, except to represent to yourself the animal? So do you study the document only in order to know the man. The shell and the document are lifeless wrecks, valuable only as a clue to the entire and living existence. We must reach back to this existence, endeavour to re-create it. It is a mistake to study the document, as if it were isolated. This were to treat things like a simple pedant, to fall into the error of the bibliomaniac. Behind all, we have neither mythology nor languages, but only men, who arrange words and imagery according to the necessities of their organs and the original bent of their intellects. A dogma is nothing in itself; look at the people who have made it,—a portrait, for instance, of the sixteenth century, the stern and energetic face of an English archbishop or martyr. Nothing exists except through some individual man; it is this individual with whom we must become acquainted. When we have established the parentage of dogmas, or the classification of poems, or the progress of constitutions, or the modification of idioms, we have only cleared the soil: genuine history is brought into existence only when the historian begins to unravel, across the lapse of time, the living man, toiling, impassioned, entrenched in his customs, with his voice and features, his gestures and his dress, distinct and complete as he from whom we have just parted in the street.

  Let no beginner think that when he has read this book, or any book, or any number of books for any number of years, he will have thoroughly learned English Literature. We can but study faithfully and work on from little to more, never to much…. No labour of this kind is intended to save any one the pains of reading good books for himself. It is useful only when it quickens the desire to come into real contact with great minds of the past, and gives the kind of knowledge that will lessen distance between us and them.

  Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough of literature.

  Every one knows how much is added to our understanding of an author’s works when we become acquainted with his biography. We thus discover what qualities he has inherited, what others have been developed through the vicissitudes of his life, and what have been attained by labor and aspiration. This is equally true to the literature of a race. It has its pedigree, its birth and childhood, its uncertain youth, and its varying fortunes through the ages, before it reaches a mature and permanent character. Although it grows in grace and variety of expression, and charms us most when it gives large and lofty utterance to the thought and feeling of our own times, we none the less need to turn back and listen to the prattle of its infancy.

  Literature is that part of thought that is wrought out in the name of the beautiful…. A poem, like that of Homer, or an essay upon Milton or Dante or Cæsar from a Macaulay, a Taine or a Froude, is created in the name of beauty, and is a fragment in literature, just as a Corinthian capital is a fragment in art. When truth, in its forward flow, joins beauty, the two rivers make a new flood called “Letters.” It is an Amazon of broad bosom, resembling the sea.

  Literature consists of a whole body of classics in the true sense of the word…. Literature consists of all the books—and they are not so many—where moral truth and human passion are touched with a certain largeness, sanity, and attraction of form. My notion of the literary student is one who through books explores the strange voyages of man’s moral reason, the impulses of the human heart, the chances and changes that have overtaken human ideals of virtue and happiness, of conduct and manners, and the shifting fortunes of great conceptions of truth and virtue. Poets, dramatists, humorists, satirists, masters of fiction, the great preachers, the character-writers, the maxim-writers, the great political orators—they are all literature in so far as they teach us to know man and to know human nature. This is what makes literature, rightly sifted and selected and rightly studied, not the mere elegant trifling that it is so often and so erroneously supposed to be, but a proper instrument for a systematic training of the imagination and sympathies, and of a genial and varied moral sensibility.

  Literature, more especially poetic and dramatic literature, is the expression in letters of the spiritual, coöperating with the intellectual, man, the former being the primary, dominant coëfficient.

  Such words as literature, as also, for other examples, beauty, poetry, imagination, idealism, are used by us all without any attempt to define for ourselves precisely what we mean by them. We find they designate accurately enough the most of the things associated with them in our thought, and we do not trouble ourselves if there be, so to speak, a ragged fringe on either side of the line of their meaning. It is only when we try to define such terms that we realize how vague and careless is our use of them. We find it difficult to make out with precision the limits of meaning we ourselves would assign to them; and when we have done that, we find our neighbor has assigned quite different ones; so that we are often driven to one of two or three makeshifts. We may give to such a word a signification so wide as to cover all its uses, but of little value because too vague to fix the essential quality that the word ought to signify; or we may give the word several meanings, showing, if we can, what they have in common; or we may arbitrarily fix on a meaning, and confine our own use to it, recognizing that others use the word in other senses.

  If we would broaden ourselves and increase our capacity for appreciating the manifold sides of the life of the spirit, we must become familiar with the thoughts and ideals of those who have given us our inspiring literature. For nearly fifteen hundred years the Anglo-Saxon race has been producing the greatest of all literatures. The most boastful of other nations make no claim to having a Shakspeare on the list of their immortals.