JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, B. 1819.

Whatever I love, my delight amounts to an extravagance. There are verses which I cannot read without tears of exultation. Those simple touches scattered here and there, by all great writers, which make me feel that I, and every most despised and outcast child of God that breathes, have a common humanity with those glorious spirits, overpower me. Poetry has a key which unlocks some more inward cabinet of my nature than is accessible to any other power. Often the mere rhyme, the cadence and sound of the words, awaken this strange feeling in me. Not only do all the happy associations of my early life, that before lay scattered, take beautiful shapes, like iron dust at the approach of the magnet; but something dim and vague beyond these, moves itself in me with the uncertain sound of a far-off sea.

I have been the bosom friend of Leander and Romeo. I seem to go behind Musæus and Shakespeare, and to get my intelligence at first hand. Sometimes in my sorrow, a line from Spenser steals in upon my memory as if by some vitality and external volition of its own, like a blast from the distant trump of a knight pricking towards the court of Faerie, and I am straightway lifted out of that sadness and shadow into the sunshine of a previous and long-agone experience.

WALT WHITMAN, B. 1819, D. 1892.

All the best experience of humanity, folded, saved, freighted to us here! Some of these tiny ships we call Old and New Testament, Homer, Eschylus, Plato, Juvenal, etc. Precious minims! I think, if we were

forced to choose, rather than have you, and the likes of you, and what belongs to, and has grown of you, blotted out and gone, we could better afford, appalling as that would be, to lose all actual ships, this day fastened by wharf, or floating on wave, and see them, with all their cargoes, scuttled and sent to the bottom.

For us, along the great highways of time, those monuments stand-those forms of majesty and beauty. For us those beacons burn through all the nights. Unknown Egyptians, graving hieroglyphs; Hindus, with hymn and apothegm and endless epic; Hebrew prophet, with spirituality, as in flashes of lightning, conscience, like red-hot iron, plaintive songs and screams of vengeance for tyrannies and enslavement; Christ, with bent head, brooding love and peace, like a dove; Greek, creating eternal shapes of physical and esthetic proportion; Roman, lord of satire, the sword, and the codex ;-of the figures, some far-off and veiled, others nearer and visible; Dante, stalking with lean form, nothing but fibre, not a grain of superfluous flesh; Angelo, and the great painters, architects, musicians; rich Shakespeare, luxuriant as the sun, artist and singer of Feudalism in its sunset, with all the gorgeous colors, owner thereof, and using them at will;and so to such as German Kant and Hegel, where they, though near us, leaping over the ages, sit again, impassive, imperturbable, like the Egyptian gods. Of these, and the like of these, is it too much, indeed, to return to our favorite figure, and to view them as orbs and systems of orbs, moving in free paths in the spaces of that other heaven, the kosmic intellect, the soul?

The process of reading is not a half-sleep, but in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay-the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or framework.

I cannot dismiss English, or British imaginative literature without the cheerful name of Walter Scott. In my opinion he deserves to stand next to Shakespeare.

GEORGE DAWSON, 1821-1876.

The great consulting room of a wise man is a library. When I am in perplexity about life, I have but to come here, and, without fee or reward, I commune with the wisest souls that God has blest the world with. If I want a discourse on immortality Plato comes to my help. If I want to know the human heart Shakespeare opens all its chambers. Whatever be my perplexity or doubt I know exactly the great man to call to me, and he comes in the kindest way, he listens to my doubts and tells me his convictions. Man has no amusement more innocent, more sweet, more gracious, more elevating, and more fortifying than he can find in a library.

CHARLES BUXTON, 1822-1871.

Readers abuse writers and say their writing is wretched stuff, stale nonsense, and so on. But what might not writers justly say of their readers? What poor, dull, indolent, feeble, careless minds do they bring to deal with thoughts whose excellence lies deep!

We are richer than we think.

And now and then it

is not a bad thing to make a catalogue raisonné of the things that are helping to make us happy. It is astonishing how long the list is! The poorest of us has property, the value of which is almost boundless; but there is not one of us who might not so till that property as to make it yield tenfold more. Our books,

gardens, families, society, friends, talk, music, art, poetry, scenery, might all bring forth to us far greater wealth of enjoyment and improvement if we tried to squeeze the very utmost out of them.

J. A. LANGFORD, B. 1823.

either

The love of books is a love which requires justification, apology, nor defence. It is a good thing in itself a possession to be thankful for, to rejoice. over, to be proud of, and to sing praises for. With this love in his heart no man is ever poor, ever without friends, or the means of making his life lovely, beautiful, and happy.

No possession can surpass, or even equal, a good library to the lover of books. Here are treasured up for his daily use and delectation riches which increase. by being consumed, and pleasures which never cloy. It is a realm as large as the universe, every part of which is peopled by spirits who lay before his feet their precious spoils as his lawful tribute. For him the poets sing, the philosophers discourse, the historians unfold the wonderful march of life, and the searchers of nature reveal the secrets and mysteries of creation. No matter what his rank or position may be, the lover

of books is the richest and the happiest of the children of men.

ROBERT COLLYER, B. 1823.

I could not go home for the Christmas of 1839, and was feeling very sad about it all, for I was only a boy; and sitting by the fire, an old farmer came in and said : "I notice thou's fond o' reading, so I brought thee summat to read." It was Irving's "Sketch Book." I had never heard of the work. I went at it, and was 66 as them that dream." No such delight had touched me since the old days of Crusoe. I saw the Hudson and the Catskills, took poor Rip at once into my heart, as everybody has, pitied Ichabod while I laughed at him, thought the old Dutch feast a most admirable. thing, and long before I was through, all regret at my lost Christmas had gone down the wind, and I had found out there are books and books. That vast hunger to read never left me. If there was no candle, I poked my head down to the fire; read while I was eating, blowing the bellows, or walking from one place to another. I could read and walk four miles an hour. The world centred in books.

JAMES HAIN FRISWELL, 1827-1878.

And when a man is at home and happy with a book, sitting by his fireside, he must be a churl if he does not communicate that happiness. Let him read now and then to his wife and children. Those thoughts will grow and take root in the hearts of the listeners. A man who feels sympathy with what is good and noble is, at the time he feels that sympathy, good and noble himself.