Let us consider how great a commodity of doctrine exists in books, how easily, how secretly, how safely they expose the nakedness of human ignorance, without putting it to shame. These are the masters who instruct us without rods and ferules, without hard words and anger, without clothes or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if investigating you interrogate them, they conceal nothing: if you mistake them, they never grumble; if you are ignorant, they cannot laugh at you.

  He hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book; he hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink; his intellect is not replenished; he is only an animal, only sensible in the duller parts.

  If I were not a King, I would be a University man; and if it were so that I must be a prisoner, if I might have my wish, I would desire to have no other prison than that library, and to be chained together with so many good authors, et mortuis magister.

  Libraries are as the shrines where all the relics of the ancient saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are preserved and reposed.

  I never come into a library (saith Heinsius) but I bolt the door to me, excluding lust, ambition, avarice, and all such vices whose nurse is idleness, the mother of ignorance and melancholy herself; and in the very lap of eternity, among so many divine souls, I take my seat with so lofty a spirit and sweet content that I pity all our great ones and rich men that know not their happiness.

  Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a progeny of life in them, to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.

  Our books…. Do not our hearts hug them, and quiet themselves in them even more than in God?

  The spectacles of books.

  Books like proverbs receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of ages through which they have passed.

  We whom the world is pleased to honour with the title of modern authors should never have been able to compass our great design of everlasting remembrance and never-dying fame if our endeavours had not been so highly serviceable to the general good of mankind.

  Read we must, be writers ever so indifferent.

  (Query) Whether the collected wisdom of all ages and nations be not found in books?

  Nor is there any paternal fondness which seems to savour less of absolute instinct, and which may be so well reconciled to worldly wisdom, as this of authors for their books. These children may most truly be called the riches of their father, and many of them have with true filial piety fed their parent in his old age; so that not only the affection but the interest of the author may be highly injured by those slanderers whose poisonous breath brings his book to an untimely end.

  My neighbours think me often alone, and yet at such times I am in company with more than five hundred mutes, each of whom communicates his ideas to me by dumb signs quite as intelligibly as any person living can do by uttering of words; and with a motion of my hand I can bring them as near to me as I please; I handle them as I like; they never complain of ill-usage; and when dismissed from my presence, though ever so abruptly, take no offence.

  I adopted the tolerating measure of the elder Pliny—“nullum esse librum tam malum ut non in aliqua parte prodesset.”

  What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labours to the Bodleians were reposing here as in some dormitory or middle state…. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odour of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of the sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.

  In my youthful days I never entered a great library … but my predominant feeling was one of pain and disturbance of mind,—not much unlike that which drew tears from Xerxes on viewing his immense army, and reflecting that in one hundred years not one soul would remain alive. To me, with respect to the books, the same effect would be brought about by my own death. Here, said I, are one hundred thousand books, the worst of them capable of giving me some pleasure and instruction; and before I can have had time to extract the honey from one-twentieth of this hive in all likelihood I shall be summoned away.

  We visit at the shrine, drink in some measure of the inspiration, and cannot easily breathe in other air less pure, accustomed to immortal fruits.

  Were I to pray for a taste which should stand me instead under every variety of circumstances, and be a source of happiness and cheerfulness to me during 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. Give a man this taste, and the means of gratifying it, and you can hardly fail of making him a happy man; unless, indeed, you put into his hands a most perverse selection of Books. You place him in contact with the best society in every period of history,—with the wisest, the wittiest, the tenderest, the bravest, and the purest characters who have adorned humanity. You make him a denizen of all nations, a contemporary of all ages.

  It is our duty to live among books.

  Nothing is pleasanter than exploring in a library.

  In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are the true levellers. They give to all, who will faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence of the best and greatest of our race. No matter how poor I am. 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, and Franklin to enrich me with his practical wisdom, I shall not pine for want of intellectual companionship, and I may become a cultivated man though excluded from what is called the best society in the place where I live…. Nothing can supply the place of books. They are cheering and soothing companions in solitude, illness, affliction. The wealth of both continents would be no equivalent for the good they impart. Let every man, if possible, gather some good books under his roof, and obtain access for himself and family to some social library. Almost any luxury should be sacrificed to this.

  On ail sides, are we not driven to the conclusion that, of the things which men can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful and worthy are the things we call Books!… For indeed, whatever be the outward form of the thing … is it not verily, at bottom, the highest act of man’s faculty that produces a Book? It is the Thought of man; the true thaumaturgic virtue; by which man works all things whatsoever. All that he does, and brings to pass, is the vesture of a Thought.

  Lightly as I have spoken of these old books, there yet lingers with me a superstitious reverence for literature of all kinds. A bound volume has a charm in my eyes similar to what scraps of manuscript possess for the good Mussulman. He imagines that those wind-wafted records are perhaps hallowed by some sacred verse; and I, that every new book or antique one may contain the “open sesame,”—the spell to disclose treasures hidden in some unsuspected cave of Truth.

  It is oppressive to conceive what a world of human thought and human passion is dwelling on the silent and senseless paper, how much of wisdom is ready to make its entrance into the mind that is prepared to give it welcome…. Reflecting on what a book can do and ought to do for you—how it may act on your mind, and your mind react on it—and thus, holding communion, you can travel through a wilderness of volumes onward, onward through time, wisely and happily, and with perfect vision of your way, as the woodman sees a path in the forest—a path to his home, while the wanderer, whether standing or staggering, is lost in blind and blank bewilderment.

  We confess a bibliothecaraian avarice that gives all books a value in our eyes; there is for us a recondite wisdom in the phrase, “A book is a book;” from the time when we made the first catalogue of our library, in which “Bible, large, 1 vol.,” and “Bible, small, 1 vol.,” asserted their alphabetic individuality and were the sole Bs in our little hive, we have had a weakness even for those checker-board volumes that only fill up; we cannot breathe the thin air of that Pepysian self-denial, that Himalayan selectness, which, content with one bookcase, would have no tomes in it but porphyrogeniti, books of the bluest blood, making room for choicer new-comers by a continuous ostracism to the garret of present incumbents. There is to us a sacredness in a volume, however dull; we live over again the author’s lonely labors and tremulous hopes; we see him, on his first appearance after parturition, “as well as could be expected,” a nervous sympathy yet surviving between the late-severed umbilical cord and the wondrous offspring.

  In a library we are surrounded by many hundred of dear friends but they are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and leathern boxes.

  It’s mighty hard to write nowadays without getting something or other worth listening to into your essay or your volume. The foolishest book is a kind of leaky boat on a sea of wisdom. Some of the wisdom will get in any how.

  Every book that we take up without a purpose, is an opportunity lost of taking up a book with a purpose—every bit of stray information which we cram into our heads without any sense of its importance, is for the most part a bit of the most useful information driven out of our heads and choked off from our minds. It is so certain that information, that is, the knowledge, the stored thoughts and observations of mankind, is now grown to proportions so utterly incalculable and prodigious, that even the learned whose lives are given to study, can but pick up some crumbs that fall from the table of truth. They delve and tend but a plot in that vast and teeming kingdom, whilst those whom active life leaves with but a few cramped hours of study can hardly come to know the very vastness of the field before them, or how infinitesimally small is the corner they can traverse at the best.

  This union of freedom with authority—of a choice for one’s self, and a willingness to believe that the world is right in setting Shakespeare above Swinburne, and Homer above Tupper—is, I believe, the true and the only guide in the selection of books to read. In the long run, nothing but truth, simplicity, purity, and a lofty purpose approves a book to the favor of the ages, and nothing else ought to approve it to the individual reader. Thus the end is reached, and the choice is made, not by taking a book because a “course of reading” commands you to do so, but because you come to see for yourself the wisdom of the selection. The pure and wholesome heart of humanity—that thing which we call conscience—is the guide of the readers as it is of every other class of workers in life.

  The book is the lens between life and the reader by which he gathers a clear knowledge of the former. There are two elements in this connection. The book receives light, it also gives light. In the consideration of the first the priority of life must be recognized as the priority of the material to the work. Literature which does not show a life below itself, and fundamental, is too shallow to live. Therefore, a man or a people must live before writing. What darkness would fall on the world if this were not so. For literature is a point of departure for new achievements, without which each person would have to start at the bottom and climb the whole hill of knowledge anew. Literature does more than this. It gives life new qualities through style. In Carlyle’s “French Revolution,” we recognize a revolution which existed in the world, because it existed in his intellect and soul. The same is true of all books. The relations between life and literature are so delicate that if the life is a little too strong for literature, or vice-versa they are much disturbed. The former is now the case. The latter was the case when Goethe lived; books were considered sacred. Literature as the food of life appeals to three faculties—curiosity, obedience, and admiration. The perfection of these in Christ makes the Bible the book of books. Literature appeals to the same vitality which gives man knowledge, and so it is the livest man who makes the best reader. A good idea is to pursue some topic as deeply as possible.

  From “The Book Hunter” I learnt a reverence for a book, a respect for it as the shrine of wisdom, a regard for it as a thing of beauty in itself. So possessed am I now by this feeling that I find Imogen were fitly punished for ill-treating the book she had been reading while Iachimo was hidden in the chest: she bade her woman, Helen, “fold down the leaf where she had left.” To fold down the leaf of a book is to torture a poor dumb friend which cannot protest in self-defense, and for this crime lèse-literature and for other reasons known to the dramatist, Imogen suffered not a little.

  Teach me rightly to admire Milton and Keats, and I will find my own criticism of living poets. Help me to enjoy, however feebly, Homer and Dante, and I will promise not to lose my head over Pollok’s “Course of Time,” or Mr. Bailey’s “Festus.” Fire my enthusiasm for Henry Vaughan and George Herbert, and I shall be able to distinguish between the muse of Miss Frances Ridley Havergal and of Miss Christina Rossetti. Train me to become a citizen of the true Republic of Letters, and I shall not be found on my knees before false gods, or trooping with the vulgar to crown with laurel brazen brows.