CONTENTS. PAGE INTRODUCTION. No people in the world are more ambitious than Americans, yet how many of us do not realize that the surest way to true success is to look beyond our own little world and broaden our lives by judicious reading. The right kind of reading furnishes a liberal and practical education and confers inestimable advantages upon the reader. Even if one reads simply for entertainment, the greatest amount of pleasure may be derived from the world's famous books rather than from inferior books. "Readers are not aware of the fact," writes Carlyle, but a fact it is of daily increasing magnitude, and already of terrible importance to readers, that their first grand necessity in reading is to be vigilantly, conscientiously select." Ruskin divides all books into two classes, "the books of the hour and the books of all time," and the great question as Frederick Harrison puts it is this: "What are the books that in our little remnant of reading time it is most vital for us to know?" The answer is in Ralph Waldo Emerson's concise, authoritative essay on "Books," which we have the pleasure to reprint in full as it originally appeared in "The Atlantic Monthly." The advice on reading by Sir John Lubbock, one of the greatest literary authorities in the world, is also included. It is thought eminently fitting to add the sentiments of other great authors "In Praise of Books," because |