How To Read

My dear Dollie, Pollie, Sallie, Marthie, or any other of my young friends whose names end in ie, who have favored me by reading thus far, the chances are three out of four that I could take the last novel but three that you read, change the scene from England to France, change the time from now to the seventeenth century, make the men swear by St. Denis, instead of talking modern slang, name the women Jacqueline and Marguerite, instead of Maud and Blanche, and, if Harpers would print it, as I dare say they would if the novel was good, you would read it through without one suspicion that you had read the same book before.

So you see that it is not certain that you know how to read, even if you took the highest prize for reading in the Amplian class of Ingham University at the last exhibition. You may pronounce all the words well, and have all the rising inflections right, and none of the falling ones wrong, and yet not know how to read so that your reading shall be of any permanent use to you.

For what is the use of reading if you forget it all the next day?

"But, my dear Mr. Hale," says as good a girl as Laura, "how am I going to help myself? What I remember I remember, and what I do not remember I do not. I should be very glad to remember all the books I have read, and all that is in them; but if I can’t, I can’t, and there is the end of it."

No! my dear Laura, that is not the end of it. And that is the reason this paper is written. A child of God can, before the end comes, do anything she chooses to, with such help as he is willing to give her, and he has been kind enough so to make and so to train you that you can train your memory to remember and to recall the useful or the pleasant things you meet in your reading. Do you know, Laura, that I have here a note you wrote when you were eight years old? It is as badly written as any note I ever saw. There are also twenty words in it spelled wrong. Suppose you had said then, “If I can’t, I can’t, and there’s an end of it.” You never would have written me in the lady-like, manly handwriting you write in to-day, spelling rightly as a matter of mere feeling and of course, so that you are annoyed now that I should say that every word is spelled correctly. Will you think, dear Laura, what a tremendous strain on memory is involved in all this? Will you remember that you and Miss Sears and Miss Winstanley, and your mother, most of all, have trained your memory till it can work these marvels? All you have to do now in your reading is to carry such training forward, and you can bring about such a power of classification and of retention that you shall be mistress of the books you have read for most substantial purposes. To read with such results is reading indeed. And when I say I want to give some hints how to read, it is for reading with that view.

Capel Lofft says, in quite an interesting book, which plays about the surface of things without going very deep, which he calls Self-Formation, that his whole life was changed, and indeed saved, when he learned that he must turn back, at the end of each sentence, ask himself what it meant, if he believed it or disbelieved it, and, so to speak, that he must pack it away as part of his mental furniture before he took in another sentence. ... Capel Lofft says that this reflection—going forward as a serpent does, by a series of backward bends over the line—will make a dull book entertaining, and will make the reader master of every book he reads, through all time. For my part, I think this is cutting it rather fine, this chopping the book up into separate bits. I had rather read as one of my wisest counsellors did; he read, say a page, or a paragraph of a page or two, more or less; then he would look across at the wall, and consider the author’s statement, and fix it on his mind, and then read on. I do not do this, however. I read half an hour or an hour, till I am ready, perhaps, to put the book by. Then I examine myself. What has this amounted to? What does he say? What does he prove? Does he prove it? What is there new in it? Where did he get it? If it is necessary in such an examination you can go back over the passage, correct your first impression, if it is wrong, find out the meaning that the writer has carelessly concealed, and such a process makes it certain that you yourself will remember his thought or his statement.

I can remember, I think, everything I saw in Europe, which was worth seeing, if I saw it twice. But there was many a wonder which I was taken to see in the whirl of sight-seeing, of which I have no memory, and of which I cannot force any recollection. ...

I think Ingham says somewhere that it is the slight difference between the two stereoscopic pictures which gives to them, when one overlies the other, their relief and distinctness. If he does not say it, I will say it for him now.

I think it makes no difference how you make this mental review of the author, but I do think it essential that, as you pass from one division of his work to another, you should make it somehow.

Another good rule for memory is indispensable, I think,—namely, to read with a pencil in hand. If the book is your own, you had better make what I may call your own index to it on the hard white page which lines the cover at the end. That is, you can write down there just a hint of the things you will be apt to like to see again, noting the page on which they are. If the book is not your own, do this on a little slip of paper, which you may keep separately. These memoranda will be, of course, of all sorts of things. Thus they will be facts which you want to know, or funny stories which you think will amuse some one, or opinions which you may have a doubt about.... Very likely you may never need one of these references; but if you do, it is certain that you will have no time to waste in hunting for them. Make your memorandum, and you are sure.

Bear in mind all along that each book will suggest other books which you are to read sooner or later. In your memoranda note with care the authors who are referred to of whom you know little or nothing, if you think you should like to know more, or ought to know more. Do not neglect this last condition, however. You do not make the memorandum to show it at the Philo-gabblian; you make it for yourself; and it means that you yourself need this additional information.

You see I am not contemplating any very rapid or slap-dash work. You may put that on your novels, or books of amusement if you choose, and I will not be very cross about it; but for the books of improvement, I want you to improve by reading them. Do not “gobble” them up so that five years hence you shall not know whether you have read them or not. What I advise seems slow to you, but if you will, any of you, make or find two hours a day to read in this fashion, you will be one day accomplished men or women. Very few professional men, known to me, get so much time as that for careful and systematic reading. If any boy or girl wants really to know what comes of such reading, I wish he would read the life of my friend George Livermore, which our friend Charles Deane has just now written for the Historical Society of Massachusetts. There was a young man, who when he was a boy in a store began his systematic reading. He never left active and laborious business; but when he died, he was one of the accomplished historical scholars of America. He had no superior in his special lines of study; he was a recognized authority and leader among men who had given their lives to scholarship.

I have not room to copy it here, but I wish any of you would turn to a letter of Frederick Robertson’s, near the end of the second volume of his letters, where he speaks of this very matter. He says he read, when he was at Oxford, but sixteen books with his tutors. But he read them so that they became a part of himself, “as the iron enters a man’s blood.” And they were books by sixteen of the men who have been leaders of the world. No bad thing, dear Stephen, to have in your blood and brain and bone, the vitalizing element that was in the lives of such men.

I need not ask you to look forward so far as to the end of a life as long as Mr. George Livermore’s, and as successful. Without asking that, I will say again, what I implied in August, that any person who will take any special subject of detail, and in a well-provided library will work steadily on that little subject for a fortnight, will at the end of the fortnight probably know more of that detail than anybody in the country knows. If you will study by subjects for the truth, you have the satisfaction of knowing that the ground is soon very nearly all your own.

I do not pretend that books are everything. I may have occasion some day to teach some of you “How to Observe,” and then I shall say some very hard things about people who keep their books so close before their eyes that they cannot see God’s world, nor their fellow-men and women. But books rightly used are society. Good books are the best society; better than is possible without them, in any one place, or in any one time. To know how to use them wisely and well, is to know how to make Shakespeare and Milton and Theodore Hook and Thomas Hood step out from the side of your room, at your will, sit down at your fire, and talk with you for an hour. I have no such society at hand, as I write these words, except by such magic. Have you in your log-cabin in No. 7?

I believe very thoroughly in courses of reading, because I believe in having one book lead to another. But, after the beginning, these courses for different persons will vary very much from each other. You all go out to a great picnic, and meet together in some pleasant place in the woods, and you put down the baskets there, and leave the pail with the ice in the shadiest place you can find, and cover it up with the blanket. Then you all set out in this great forest, which we call Literature. But it is only a few of the party, who choose to start hand in hand along a gravel-path there is, which leads straight to the Burgesses’ well, and probably those few enjoy less and gain less from the day’s excursion than any of the rest. The rest break up into different knots, and go some here and some there, as their occasion and their genius call them. Some go after flowers, some after berries, some after butterflies; some knock the rocks to pieces, some get up where there is a fine view, some sit down and sketch the stumps, some go into water, some make a fire, some find a camp of Indians and learn how to make baskets. Then they all come back to the picnic in good spirits and with good appetites, each eager to tell the others what he has seen and heard, each having satisfied his own taste and genius, and each and all having made vastly more out of the day than if they had all held to the gravel-path and walked in column to the Burgesses’ well and back again.

This, you see, is a long parable for the purpose of making you remember that there are but few books which it is necessary for every intelligent boy and girl, man and woman, to have read. Of those few, I had as lief give the list here.

of which not only is an intelligent knowledge necessary for your healthy growth in religious life, but—which is of less consequence, indeed—it is as necessary for your tolerable understanding of the literature, or even science, of a world which for eighteen centuries has been under the steady influence of the Bible. Around the English version of it as Mr. Marsh* shows so well, the English language of the last three centuries has revolved, as the earth revolves around the sun. He means, that although the language of one time differs from that of another, it is always at about the same distance from the language of King James’s Bible.

All of you should know the general history of the United States well. You should know the history of your own State in more detail, and of your own town in the most detail of all.

Now it does not make so much difference how you compass this general historical knowledge, if, in its main features, you do compass it. When Mr. Lincoln went down to Norfolk to see the rebel commissioners, Mr. Hunter, on their side, cited, as a precedent for the action which he wanted the President to pursue, the negotiations between Charles the First and his Parliament. Mr. Lincoln’s eyes twinkled, and he said, “Upon questions of history I must refer you to Mr. Seward, for he is posted upon such things, and I do not profess to be. My only distinct recollection of the matter is, that Charles lost his head.” Now you see it is of no sort of consequence how Mr. Lincoln got his thoroughly sound knowledge of the history of England,—in which, by the way, he was entirely at home,—and he had a perfect right to pay the compliment he did to Mr. Seward; but it was of great importance to him that he should not be haunted with the fear that the other man did know, really, of some important piece of negotiation of which he was ignorant. It was important to him to know that, so that he might be sure that his joke was—as it was—exactly the fitting answer.

Most people would have named them before the history, but I do not. I do not care, however, how early you read them in life, and, as we shall see, they will be among your best guides for the history of England.

Lastly, it is a disgrace to read even the newspaper, without knowing where the places are which are spoken of. You need, therefore, the very best atlas you can provide yourself with. The atlas you had when you studied geography at school is better than none. But if you can compass any more precise and full, so much the better. Colton’s American Atlas is good. The large cheap maps, published two on one roller by Lloyd, are good; if you can give but five dollars for your maps, perhaps this is the best investment. For the other hemisphere, Black’s Atlas is good. Rogers’s, published in Edinburgh, is very complete in its American maps. Stieler’s is cheap and reliable.

That is the first rule. Do not think you must be a Universal Genius. Do not “read all Reviews,” as an old code I had bade young men do. And give up, as early as you can, the passion, with which all young people naturally begin, of “keeping up with the literature of the time.” As for the literature of the time, if one were to adopt any extreme rule, Mr. Emerson’s would be the better of the two possible extremes. He says it is wise to read no book till it has been printed a year; that, before the year is well over, many of those books drift out of sight, which just now all the newspapers are telling you to read. But then, seriously, I do not suppose he acts on that rule himself. Nor need you and I. Only, we will not try to read them all.

Now, for selecting the path, what shall we do,—since one cannot in one little life attempt them all?

You can select for yourself, if you will only keep a cool head, and have your eyes open. First of all, remember that what you want from books is the information in them, and the stimulus they give to you, and the amusement for your recreation. You do not read for the poor pleasure of saying you have read them. You are reading for the subject, much more than for the particular book, and if you find that you have exhausted all the book has on your subject, then you are to leave that book, whether you have read it through or not. In some cases you read because the author’s own mind is worth knowing; and then the more you read the better you know him. But these cases do not affect the rule. You read for what is in the books, not that you may mark such a book off from a “course of reading,” or say at the next meeting of the “Philogabblian Society” that you “have just been reading Kant or Godwin.” What is the subject, then, which you want to read upon?

Half the boys and girls who read this have been so well trained that they know. They know what they want to know. One is sure that she wants to know more about Mary Queen of Scots; another, that he wants to know more about fly-fishing; another, that she wants to know more about the Egyptian hieroglyphics; another, that he wants to know more about propagating new varieties of pansies; another, that she wants to know more about “The Ring and the Book”; another, that he wants to know more about the “Tenure of Office bill.” Happy is this half. To know your ignorance is the great first step to its relief. To confess it, as has been said before, is the second. In a minute I will be ready to say what I can to this happy half; but one minute first for the less happy half, who know they want to read something because it is so nice to read a pleasant book, but who do not know what that something is. They come to us, as their ancestors came to a relative of mine who was librarian of a town library sixty years ago; “Please, sir, mother wants a sermon book, and another book.”

To these undecided ones I simply say, now has the time come for decision. Your school studies have undoubtedly opened up so many subjects to you that you very naturally find it hard to select between them. Shall you keep up your drawing, or your music, or your history, or your botany, or your chemistry? Very well in the schools, my dear Alice, to have started you in these things, but now you are coming to be a woman, it is for you to decide which shall go forward; it is not for Miss Winstanley, far less for me, who never saw your face, and know nothing of what you can or cannot do.

Now you can decide in this way. Tell me, or tell yourself, what is the passage in your reading or in your life for the last week which rests on your memory. Let us see if we thoroughly understand that passage. If we do not, we will see if we cannot learn to. That will give us a “course of reading” for the next twelve months, or if we choose, for the rest of our lives. There is no end, you will see, to a true course of reading; and, on the other hand, you may about as well begin at one place as another. Remember that you have infinite lives before you, so you need not hurry in the details for fear the work should be never done.

Remember, however, that there are no royal roads. The difference between a well-educated person and one not well educated is, that the first knows how to find what he needs, and the other does not. It is not so much that the first is better informed on details than the second, though he probably is. But his power to collect the details at short notice is vastly greater than is that of the uneducated or unlearned man.

So much for the way in which to choose your books. As to the choice, you will make it, not I. If you are a goose, cackling a great deal, silly at heart and wholly indifferent about to-morrow, you will choose just what you call the interesting titles. If you are a girl of sense, or a boy of sense, you will choose, when you have made your list, at least two books, determined to master them. You will choose one on the side of information, and one for the purpose of amusement, on the side of fancy. If you choose in “Venice” the “Merchant of Venice,” you will not add to it “Venice Preserved,” but you will add to it, say the Venetian chapters of “Sismondi’s Italy.” You will read every day; and you will divide your reading time into the two departments,—you will read for fact and you will read for fancy. Roots must have leaves, you know, and leaves must have roots. Bodies must have spirits, and, for this world at least, spirits must have bodies. Fact must be lighted by fancy, and fancy must be balanced by fact. Making this the principle of your selection, you may, nay, you must, select for yourselves your books. And in our next paper I will do my best to teach you

How To Read Them.

IV. HOW TO READ: The Choice of Books.

You are not to expect any stories this time. There will be very few words about Stephen, or Sibyl, or Sarah. My business now is rather to answer, as well as I can, such questions as young people ask who are beginning to have their time at their own command, and can make their own selection of the books they are to read. I have before me, as I write, a handful of letters which have been written to the office of “The Young Folks” asking such questions. And all my intelligent young friends are asking each other such questions, and so ask them of me every day. I shall answer these questions by laying down some general rules, just as I have done before; but I shall try to put you into the way of choosing your own books, rather than choosing for you a long, defined list of them.

I believe very thoroughly in courses of reading, because I believe in having one book lead to another. But, after the beginning, these courses for different persons will vary very much from each other. You all go out to a great picnic, and meet together in some pleasant place in the woods, and you put down the baskets there, and leave the pail with the ice in the shadiest place you can find, and cover it up with the blanket. Then you all set out in this great forest, which we call Literature. But it is only a few of the party, who choose to start hand in hand along a gravel-path there is, which leads straight to the Burgesses’ well, and probably those few enjoy less and gain less from the day’s excursion than any of the rest. The rest break up into different knots, and go some here and some there, as their occasion and their genius call them. Some go after flowers, some after berries, some after butterflies; some knock the rocks to pieces, some get up where there is a fine view, some sit down and sketch the stumps, some go into water, some make a fire, some find a camp of Indians and learn how to make baskets. Then they all come back to the picnic in good spirits and with good appetites, each eager to tell the others what he has seen and heard, each having satisfied his own taste and genius, and each and all having made vastly more out of the day than if they had all held to the gravel-path and walked in column to the Burgesses’ well and back again.

This, you see, is a long parable for the purpose of making you remember that there are but few books which it is necessary for every intelligent boy and girl, man and woman, to have read. Of those few, I had as lief give the list here.

First is the Bible, of which not only is an intelligent knowledge necessary for your healthy growth in religious life, but—which is of less consequence, indeed—it is as necessary for your tolerable understanding of the literature, or even science, of a world which for eighteen centuries has been under the steady influence of the Bible. Around the English version of it as Mr. Marsh*Marsh’s Lectures on the English Language: very entertaining books. [Footnote in the original. Copies may be found at archive.org from the Cornell University Library, the University of Toronto, among others.] shows so well, the English language of the last three centuries has revolved, as the earth revolves around the sun. He means, that although the language of one time differs from that of another, it is always at about the same distance from the language of King James’s Bible.

Second, every one ought to be quite well informed as to the history of the country in which he lives. All of you should know the general history of the United States well. You should know the history of your own State in more detail, and of your own town in the most detail of all.

Third, an American needs to have a clear knowledge of the general features of the history of England.

Now it does not make so much difference how you compass this general historical knowledge, if, in its main features, you do compass it. When Mr. Lincoln went down to Norfolk to see the rebel commissioners, Mr. Hunter, on their side, cited, as a precedent for the action which he wanted the President to pursue, the negotiations between Charles the First and his Parliament. Mr. Lincoln’s eyes twinkled, and he said, “Upon questions of history I must refer you to Mr. Seward, for he is posted upon such things, and I do not profess to be. My only distinct recollection of the matter is, that Charles lost his head.” Now you see it is of no sort of consequence how Mr. Lincoln got his thoroughly sound knowledge of the history of England,—in which, by the way, he was entirely at home,—and he had a perfect right to pay the compliment he did to Mr. Seward; but it was of great importance to him that he should not be haunted with the fear that the other man did know, really, of some important piece of negotiation of which he was ignorant. It was important to him to know that, so that he might be sure that his joke was—as it was—exactly the fitting answer.

Fourth, it is necessary that every intelligent American or Englishman should have read carefully most of Shakespeare’s plays. Most people would have named them before the history, but I do not. I do not care, however, how early you read them in life, and, as we shall see, they will be among your best guides for the history of England.

Lastly, it is a disgrace to read even the newspaper, without knowing where the places are which are spoken of. You need, therefore, the very best atlas you can provide yourself with. The atlas you had when you studied geography at school is better than none. But if you can compass any more precise and full, so much the better. Colton’s American Atlas is good. The large cheap maps, published two on one roller by Lloyd, are good; if you can give but five dollars for your maps, perhaps this is the best investment. For the other hemisphere, Black’s Atlas is good. Rogers’s, published in Edinburgh, is very complete in its American maps. Stieler’s is cheap and reliable.

When people talk of the “books which no gentleman’s library should be without,” the list may be boiled down, I think—if in any stress we should be reduced to the bread-and-water diet—to such books as will cover these five fundamental necessities. If you cannot buy the Bible, the agent of the County Bible Society will give you one. You can buy the whole of Shakespeare for fifty cents in Dicks’s edition. And, within two miles of the place where you live, there are books enough for all the historical study I have prescribed. So, in what I now go on to say, I shall take it for granted that we have all of us made thus much preparation, or can make it. These are the central stores of the picnic, which we can fall back upon, after our explorations in our various lines of literature.

Now for our several courses of reading. How am I to know what are your several tastes, or the several lines of your genius? Here are, as I learn from Mr. Osgood, some seventy-six thousand five hundred and forty-three Young Folks, be the same more or less, who are reading this paper. How am I to tell what are their seventy-six thousand five hundred and forty-three tastes, dispositions, or lines of genius? I cannot tell. Perhaps they could not tell themselves, not being skilled in self-analysis; and it is by no means necessary that they should be able to tell. Perhaps we can set down on paper what will be much better, the rules or the system by which each of them may read well in the line of his own genius, and so find out, before he has done with this life, what the line of that genius is, as far as there is any occasion.

Do not try to read Everything.

That is the first rule. Do not think you must be a Universal Genius. Do not “read all Reviews,” as an old code I had bade young men do. And give up, as early as you can, the passion, with which all young people naturally begin, of “keeping up with the literature of the time.” As for the literature of the time, if one were to adopt any extreme rule, Mr. Emerson’s would be the better of the two possible extremes. He says it is wise to read no book till it has been printed a year; that, before the year is well over, many of those books drift out of sight, which just now all the newspapers are telling you to read. But then, seriously, I do not suppose he acts on that rule himself. Nor need you and I. Only, we will not try to read them all.

Here I must warn my young friend Jamie not to go on talking about renouncing “nineteenth century trash.” It will not do to use such words about a century in which have written Goethe, Fichte, Cuvier, Schleiermacher, Martineau, Scott, Tennyson, Thackeray, Browning, and Dickens, not to mention a hundred others whom Jamie likes to read, as much as I do.

No. We will trust to conversation with the others, who have had their different paths in this picnic party of ours, to learn from them just the brightest and best things that they have seen and heard. And we will try to be able to tell them, simply and truly, the best things we find on our own paths. Now, for selecting the path, what shall we do,—since one cannot in one little life attempt them all?

You can select for yourself, if you will only keep a cool head, and have your eyes open. First of all, remember that what you want from books is the information in them, and the stimulus they give to you, and the amusement for your recreation. You do not read for the poor pleasure of saying you have read them. You are reading for the subject, much more than for the particular book, and if you find that you have exhausted all the book has on your subject, then you are to leave that book, whether you have read it through or not. In some cases you read because the author’s own mind is worth knowing; and then the more you read the better you know him. But these cases do not affect the rule. You read for what is in the books, not that you may mark such a book off from a “course of reading,” or say at the next meeting of the “Philogabblian Society” that you “have just been reading Kant or Godwin.” What is the subject, then, which you want to read upon?

Half the boys and girls who read this have been so well trained that they know. They know what they want to know. One is sure that she wants to know more about Mary Queen of Scots; another, that he wants to know more about fly-fishing; another, that she wants to know more about the Egyptian hieroglyphics; another, that he wants to know more about propagating new varieties of pansies; another, that she wants to know more about “The Ring and the Book”; another, that he wants to know more about the “Tenure of Office bill.” Happy is this half. To know your ignorance is the great first step to its relief. To confess it, as has been said before, is the second. In a minute I will be ready to say what I can to this happy half; but one minute first for the less happy half, who know they want to read something because it is so nice to read a pleasant book, but who do not know what that something is. They come to us, as their ancestors came to a relative of mine who was librarian of a town library sixty years ago; “Please, sir, mother wants a sermon book, and another book.”

To these undecided ones I simply say, now has the time come for decision. Your school studies have undoubtedly opened up so many subjects to you that you very naturally find it hard to select between them. Shall you keep up your drawing, or your music, or your history, or your botany, or your chemistry? Very well in the schools, my dear Alice, to have started you in these things, but now you are coming to be a woman, it is for you to decide which shall go forward; it is not for Miss Winstanley, far less for me, who never saw your face, and know nothing of what you can or cannot do.

Now you can decide in this way. Tell me, or tell yourself, what is the passage in your reading or in your life for the last week which rests on your memory. Let us see if we thoroughly understand that passage. If we do not, we will see if we cannot learn to. That will give us a “course of reading” for the next twelve months, or if we choose, for the rest of our lives. There is no end, you will see, to a true course of reading; and, on the other hand, you may about as well begin at one place as another. Remember that you have infinite lives before you, so you need not hurry in the details for fear the work should be never done.

Now I must show you how to go to work, by supposing you have been interested in some particular passage. Let us take a passage from Macaulay, which I marked in the Edinburgh Review for Sydney to speak, twenty-nine years ago,—I think before I had ever heard Macaulay’s name. A great many of you boys have spoken it at school since then, and many of you girls have heard scraps from it. It is a brilliant passage, rather too ornate for daily food, but not amiss for a luxury, more than candied orange is after a state dinner. He is speaking of the worldly wisdom and skilful human policy of the method of organization of the Roman Catholic Church. He says:—

“The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilization. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century, to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. The Republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the Republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy; and the Republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigor. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustin; and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. . . . .

“She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigor, when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.”

I. We will not begin by considering the wisdom or the mistake of the general opinion here laid down. We will begin by trying to make out what is the real meaning of the leading words employed. Look carefully along the sentence, and see if you are quite sure of what is meant by such terms as “The Roman Catholic Church,” “the Pantheon,” “the Flavian amphitheatre,” “the Supreme Pontiffs,” “the Pope who crowned Napoleon,” “the Pope who crowned Pepin,” “the Republic of Venice,” “the missionaries who landed in Kent,” “Augustin,” “the Saxon had set foot in Britain,” “the Frank had passed the Rhine,” “Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch,” “idols in Mecca,” “New Zealand,” “London Bridge,” “St. Paul’s.”

For really working up a subject—and this sentence now is to be our subject—I advise a blank book, and, for my part, I like to write down the key words or questions, in a vertical line, quite far apart from each other, on the first pages. You will see why, if you will read on.

II. Now go to work on this list. What do you really know about the organization of the Roman Catholic Church? If you find you are vague about it, that such knowledge as you have is only half knowledge, which is no knowledge, read till you are clear. Much information is not necessary, but good, as far as it goes, is necessary on any subject. This is a controverted subject. You ought to try, therefore, to read some statement by a Catholic author, and some statement by a Protestant. To find out what to read, on this or any subject, there are different clews.

1. Any encyclopædia, good or bad, will set you on the trail. Most of you have or can have an encyclopædia at command. There are one-volume encyclopædias better than nothing, which are very cheap. You can pick up an edition of the old Encyclopædia Americana, in twelve volumes, for ten or twelve dollars. Or you can buy Appleton’s, which is really quite good, for sixty dollars a set. I do not mean to have you rest on any encyclopædia, but you will find one at the start an excellent guide-post. Suppose you have the old Encyclopædia Americana. You will find there that the “Roman Catholic Church” is treated by two writers,—one a Protestant, and one a Catholic. Read both, and note in your book such allusions as interest you, which you want more light upon. Do not note everything which you do not know, for then you cannot get forward. But note all that specially interests you. For instance, it seems that the Roman Catholic Church is not so called by that church itself. The officers of that church might call it the Roman church, or the Catholic church, but would not call it the Roman Catholic church. At the Congress of Vienna, Cardinal Consalvi objected to the joint use of the words Roman Catholic church. Do you know what the Congress of Vienna was? No? then make a memorandum, if you want to know. We might put in another for Cardinal Consalvi. He was a man, who had a father and mother, perhaps brothers and sisters. He will give us a little human interest, if we stop to look him up. But do not stop for him now. Work through “Roman Catholic Church,” and keep these memoranda in your book for another day.

2. Quite different from the encyclopædia is another book of reference, “Poole’s Index.” This is a general index to seventy-three magazines and reviews, which were published between the years 1802 and 1852. Now a great deal of the best work of this century has been put into such journals. A reference, then, to “Poole’s Index” is a reference to some of the best separate papers on the subjects which for fifty years had most interest for the world of reading men and women. Let us try “Poole’s Index” on “The Republic of Venice.” There are references to articles on Venice, in the New England Magazine, in the Pamphleteer, in the Monthly Review, Edinburgh, Quarterly, Westminster and De Bow’s Reviews. Copy all these references carefully, if you have any chance at any time, of access to any of these journals. It is not, you know, at all necessary to have them in the house. Probably there is some friend’s collection or public library where you can find one or more of them. If you live in or near Boston, or New York, or Philadelphia, or Charleston, or New Orleans, or Cincinnati, or St. Louis, or Ithaca, you can find every one.

When you have carefully gone down this original list, and made your memoranda for it, you are prepared to work out these memoranda. You begin now to see how many there are. You must be guided, of course, in your reading, by the time you have, and by the opportunity for getting the books. But, aside from that, you may choose what you like best, for a beginning. To make this simple by an illustration, I will suppose you have been using the old Encyclopædia Americana, or Appleton’s Cyclopædia and Poole’s Index only, for your first list. As I should draw it up, it would look like this:—

Cyclopædia.	Poole’s Index.
ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH.
See (for instance)	Eclectic Rev., 4th S. 13, 485.
Council of Trent.	Quart. Rev., 71, 108.
Chrysostom.	For. Quart. Rev., 27, 184.
Congress of Vienna.	Brownson’s Rev., 2d S. 1, 413; 3, 309.
Cardinal Consalvi.	N. Brit. Rev., 10, 21.
THE PANTHEON.
Built by Agrippa. Consecrated, 607, to St. Mary ad Martyros. Called Rotunda.
THE FLAVIAN AMPHITHEATRE.
The Coliseum, b. by T. Flavius Vespasian.
SUPREME PONTIFFS.
Popes. The line begins with St. Peter, a. d. 42. Ends with Pius IX., 1846.	New-Englander, 7, 169.
	N. Brit. Rev., 11, 135.
POPE WHO CROWNED NAPOLEON.
Pius VII., at Notre Dame, in Paris, Dec. 2, 1804.	For. Quar. Rev., 20, 54.
POPE WHO CROWNED PEPIN.
Probably Pepin le Bref is meant. But he was not crowned by a Pope. Crowned by Archbishop Boniface of Mayence, at the advice of Pope Zachary. b. @ 715. d. 768.
REPUBLIC OF VENICE.
452 to 1815. St. Real’s History.	Quart. Rev., 31, 420.
Otway’s Tragedy, Venice Preserved.	Month. Rev., 90, 525.
Hazlitt’s Hist. of Venice.	West. Rev., 23, 38.
Ruskin’s Stones of Venice.
MISSIONARIES IN KENT.
	Dublin Univ. Mag., 21, 212.
AUGUSTIN.
There are two Augustins. This is St. Austin, b. in 5th century, d. 604-614.
Southey’s Book of Church.
Sharon Turner’s Anglo-Saxons.
Wm. of Malmesbury.
Bede’s Ecc. History.
SAXON IN BRITAIN.
Turner as above.	Edin. Rev., 89, 79.
Ang.-Saxon Chronicle.	Quart. Rev., 7, 92.
Six old Eng. Chronicles.	Eclect. Rev., 25, 669.
FRANK PASSED THE RHINE.
Well established on west side, at the beginning of 5th century.	For. Quart. Rev., 17, 139.
GREEK ELOQUENCE AT ANTIOCH.
Muller’s Antiquitates Antiochianæ.	Greek Orators. Ed. Rev., 36, 62.
IDOLS IN MECCA.
Burckhardt’s Travels.
Burton’s Travels.
NEW ZEALAND.
3 islands, as large as Italy. Discovered, 1642: taken by Cook for England, 1769.	N. Am. Rev., 18, 328.
Gov. sent out, 1838.	West. Rev., 45, 133.
Thomson’s Story of N. Z.	Edin. Rev., 91, 231; 56, 333.
Cook’s Voyages.	N. Brit. Rev., 16, 176.
Sir G. Gray’s Poems, &c. of Maoris.	Living Age,
LONDON BRIDGE.
5 elliptical arches. “Presents an aspect unequalled for interest and animation.”
ST. PAUL’S.
Built in 30 years between 1675 and 1705, by Christ. Wren.

Now I am by no means going to leave you to the reading of cyclopædias. The vice of cyclopædias is that they are dull. What is done for this passage of Macaulay in the lists above is only preliminary. It could be easily done in three hours’ time, if you went carefully to work. And when you have done it, you have taught yourself a good deal about your own knowledge and your own ignorance,—about what you should read and what you should not attempt. So far it fits you for selecting your own course of reading.

I have arranged this only by way of illustration. I do not mean that I think these a particularly interesting or particularly important series of subjects. I do mean, however, to show you that the moment you will sift any book or any series of subjects, you will be finding out where your ignorance is, and what you want to know.

Supposing you belong to the fortunate half of people who know what they need, I should advise you to begin in just the same way.

For instance, Walter, to whom I alluded above, wants to know about Fly-Fishingi>. This is the way his list looks.

See also,

Izaak Walton, Compleat Angler. (Walton and Cotton first appeared, 1750.)
Humphrey Day’s Salmonia, or The Days of Fly-Fishing.
Blakey, History of Angling Literature.
Oppianus, De Venatione, Piscatione et Aucupio. (Halieutica translated.) Jones’s English translation was published in Oxford, 1722.
Bronner, Fischergedichte und Erzählungen (Fishermen’s Songs and Stories).
Norris, T., American Angler’s Book.
Zouch, Life of Iz. Walton.
Salmon Fisheries. Parliamentary Reports. Annual.
“Blackwood’s Magazine, an important landmark in English angling literature.” See Noctes Ambrosianæ.
H. W. Beecher, N. Y. Independent, 1853.
In the New York edition of Walton and Cotton is a list of books on Angling, which Blakey enlarges. His list contains four hundred and fifty titles.
American Angler’s Guide, 1849.
Storer, D. H., Fishes of Massachusetts.
Storer, D. H., Fishes of N. America.
Girard, Fresh-Water Fishes of N. America (Smithsonian Contributions, Vol. III.).
Richard Penn, Maxims and Hints for an Angler, and Miseries of Fishing, 1839.
James Wilson, The Rod and the Gun, 1840.
Herbert, Frank Forester’s Fish of N. America.
Yarrel’s British Fishes.
The same, on the Growth of Salmon.
Boy’s Own Book.

Please to observe, now, that nobody is obliged to read up all the authorities that we have lighted on. What the lists mean are this;—that you have made the inquiry for “a sermon book and another book,” and you are now thus far on your way toward an answer. These are the first answers that come to hand. Work on and you will have more. I cannot pretend to give that answer for any one of you,—far less for all those who would be likely to be interested in all the subjects which are named here. But with such clews as are given above, you will soon find your ways into the different parts that interest you of our great picnic grove.

Remember, however, that there are no royal roads. The difference between a well-educated person and one not well educated is, that the first knows how to find what he needs, and the other does not. It is not so much that the first is better informed on details than the second, though he probably is. But his power to collect the details at short notice is vastly greater than is that of the uneducated or unlearned man.

In different homes, the resources at command are so different that I must not try to advise much as to your next step beyond the lists above. There are many good catalogues of books, with indexes to subjects. In the Congressional Library, my friend Mr. Vinton is preparing a magnificent “Index of Subjects,” which will be of great use to the whole nation. In Harvard College Library they have a manuscript catalogue referring to the subjects described in the books of that collection. The “Cross-References” of the Astor Catalogue, and of the Boston Library Catalogue, are invaluable to all readers, young or old. Your teacher at school can help you in nothing more than in directing you to the books you need on any subject. Do not go and say, “Miss Winstanley, or Miss Parsons, I want a nice book”; but have sense enough to know what you want it to be about. Be able to say,—“Miss Parsons, I should like to know about heraldry,” or “about butterflies,” or “about water-color painting,” or “about Robert Browning,” or “about the Mysteries of Udolpho.” Miss Parsons will tell you what to read. And she will be very glad to tell you. Or if you are not at school, this very thing among others is what the minister is for. Do not be frightened. He will be very glad to see you. Go round to his house, not on Saturday, but at the time he receives guests, and say to him: “Mr. Ingham, we girls have made quite a collection of old porcelain, and we want to know more about it. Will you be kind enough to tell us where we can find anything about porcelain. We have read Miss Edgeworth’s ‘Prussian Vase’ and we have read ‘Palissy the Potter,’ and we should like to know more about Sevres, and Dresden, and Palissy.” Ingham will be delighted, and in a fortnight, if you will go to work, you will know more about what you ask for than any one person knows in America.

And I do not mean that all your reading is to be digging or hard work. I can show that I do not, by supposing that we carry out the plan of the list above,—on any one of its details, and write down the books which that detail suggests to us. Perhaps Venice has seemed to you the most interesting head of these which we have named. If we follow that up only in the references given above, we shall find our book list for Venice, just as it comes, in no order but that of accident, is:—

St. Real, Relation des Espagnols contre Venise.
Otway’s Venice Preserved.
Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.
Howells’s Venetian Life.
Blondus. De Origine Venetorum.
Muratori’s Annals.
Ruskin’s Stones of Venice.
D’Israeli’s Contarin Flemiing.
Contarina, Della Republica di Vinetia.
Flagg, Venice from 1797 to 1849.
Crassus, De Republica Veneta.
Jarmot, De Republica Veneta.
Voltaire’s General History.
Sismondi’s History of Italy.
Lord Byron’s Letters.
Sketches of Venetian History, Fam. Library, 26, 27.
Venetian History, Hazlitt.
Dandolo, G. La Caduta della Republica di Venezia (The Fall of the Republic of Venice).
Ridolfi, C., Lives of the Venetian Painters.
Monagas, J. T., Late Events in Venice.
Delavigne, Marino Faliero, a Historical Drama.
Lord Byron, The same.
Smedley’s Sketches from Venetian History.
Daru, Hist. de la Republique de Venise.

So much for the way in which to choose your books. As to the choice, you will make it, not I. If you are a goose, cackling a great deal, silly at heart and wholly indifferent about to-morrow, you will choose just what you call the interesting titles. If you are a girl of sense, or a boy of sense, you will choose, when you have made your list, at least two books, determined to master them. You will choose one on the side of information, and one for the purpose of amusement, on the side of fancy. If you choose in “Venice” the “Merchant of Venice,” you will not add to it “Venice Preserved,” but you will add to it, say the Venetian chapters of “Sismondi’s Italy.” You will read every day; and you will divide your reading time into the two departments,—you will read for fact and you will read for fancy. Roots must have leaves, you know, and leaves must have roots. Bodies must have spirits, and, for this world at least, spirits must have bodies. Fact must be lighted by fancy, and fancy must be balanced by fact. Making this the principle of your selection, you may, nay, you must, select for yourselves your books. And in our next paper I will do my best to teach you

Edward E. Hale.

V. HOW TO READ: Second Paper.

Liston tells a story of a nice old lady—I think the foster-sister of the godmother of his brother-in-law’s aunt—who came to make them a visit in the country. The first day after she arrived proved to be much such a day as this is,—much such a day as the first of a visit in the country is apt to be,—a heavy pelting northeaster, when it is impossible to go out, and every one is thrown on his own resources in-doors. The different ladies under Mrs. Liston’s hospitable roof gathered themselves to their various occupations, and some one asked old Mrs. Dubbadoe if she would not like to read.

She said she should.

“What shall I bring you from the library?” said Miss Ellen. “Do not trouble yourself to go up stairs.”

“My dear Ellen, I should like the same book I had last year when I was here. It was a very nice book, and I was very much interested in it.”

“Certainly,” said Miss Ellen; “what was it? I will bring it at once.”

“I do not remember its name, my dear; your mother brought it to me; I think she would know.”

But, unfortunately, Mrs. Liston, when applied to, had forgotten.

“Was it a novel, Mrs. Dubbadoe?”

“I can’t remember that,—my memory is not as good as it was, my dear,—but it was a very interesting book.”

“Do you remember whether it had plates? Was it one of the books of birds, or of natural history?”

“No, dear, I can’t tell you about that. But, Ellen, you will find it, I know. The color of the cover was the color of the top of the baluster!”

So Ellen went. She has a good eye for color, and as she ran up stairs she took the shade of the baluster in her eye, matched it perfectly as she ran along the books in the library with the Russia half-binding of the coveted volume, and brought that in triumph to Mrs. Dubbadoe. It proved to be the right book. Mrs. Dubbadoe found in it the piece of corn-colored worsted she had left for a mark the year before, so she was able to go on where she had stopped then.

Liston tells this story to trump one of mine about a schoolmate of ours, who was explaining to me about his theological studies. I asked him what he had been reading.

“O, a capital book; King lent it to me; I will ask him to lend it to you.”

I said I would ask King for the book, if he would tell me who was the author.

“I do not remember his name. I had not known his name before. But that made no difference. It is a capital book. King told me I should find it so, and I did; I made a real study of it; copied a good deal from it before I returned it.”

I asked whether it was a book of natural theology.

“I don’t know as you would call it natural theology. Perhaps it was. You had better see it yourself. Tell King it was the book he lent me.”

I was a little persistent, and asked if it were a book of biography.

“Well, I do not know as I should say it was a book of biography. Perhaps you would say so. I do not remember that there was much biography in it. But it was an excellent book. King had read it himself, and I found it all he said it was.

“I asked if it was critical,—if it explained Scripture.”

“Perhaps it did. I should not like to say whether it did or not. You can find that out yourself if you read it. But it is a very interesting book and a very valuable book. King said so, and I found it was so. You had better read it, and I know King can tell you what it is.”

Now in these two stories is a very good illustration of the way in which a great many people read. The notion comes into people’s lives that the mere process of reading is itself virtuous. Because young men who read instead of gamble are known to be “steadier” than the gamblers, and because children who read on Sunday make less noise and general row than those who will play tag in the neighbors’ front-yards, there has grown up this notion, that to read is in itself one of the virtuous acts. Some people, if they told the truth, when counting up the seven virtues, would count them as Purity, Temperance, Meekness, Frugality, Honesty, Courage, and Reading. The consequence is that there are unnumbered people who read as Mrs. Dubbadoe did or as Lysimachus did, without the slightest knowledge of what the books have contained.

My dear Dollie, Pollie, Sallie, Marthie, or any other of my young friends whose names end in ie, who have favored me by reading thus far, the chances are three out of four that I could take the last novel but three that you read, change the scene from England to France, change the time from now to the seventeenth century, make the men swear by St. Denis, instead of talking modern slang, name the women Jacqueline and Marguerite, instead of Maud and Blanche, and, if Harpers would print it, as I dare say they would if the novel was good, you would read it through without one suspicion that you had read the same book before.

So you see that it is not certain that you know how to read, even if you took the highest prize for reading in the Amplian class of Ingham University at the last exhibition. You may pronounce all the words well, and have all the rising inflections right, and none of the falling ones wrong, and yet not know how to read so that your reading shall be of any permanent use to you.

For what is the use of reading if you forget it all the next day?

“But, my dear Mr. Hale,” says as good a girl as Laura, “how am I going to help myself? What I remember I remember, and what I do not remember I do not. I should be very glad to remember all the books I have read, and all that is in them; but if I can’t, I can’t, and there is the end of it.”

No! my dear Laura, that is not the end of it. And that is the reason this paper is written. A child of God can, before the end comes, do anything she chooses to, with such help as he is willing to give her, and he has been kind enough so to make and so to train you that you can train your memory to remember and to recall the useful or the pleasant things you meet in your reading. Do you know, Laura, that I have here a note you wrote when you were eight years old? It is as badly written as any note I ever saw. There are also twenty words in it spelled wrong. Suppose you had said then, “If I can’t, I can’t, and there’s an end of it.” You never would have written me in the lady-like, manly handwriting you write in to-day, spelling rightly as a matter of mere feeling and of course, so that you are annoyed now that I should say that every word is spelled correctly. Will you think, dear Laura, what a tremendous strain on memory is involved in all this? Will you remember that you and Miss Sears and Miss Winstanley, and your mother, most of all, have trained your memory till it can work these marvels? All you have to do now in your reading is to carry such training forward, and you can bring about such a power of classification and of retention that you shall be mistress of the books you have read for most substantial purposes. To read with such results is reading indeed. And when I say I want to give some hints how to read, it is for reading with that view.

When Harry and Lucy were on their journey to the sea-side, they fell to discussing whether they had rather have the gift of remembering all they read, or of once knowing everything, and then taking their chances for recollecting it when they wanted it. Lucy, who had a quick memory, was willing to take her chance. But Harry, who was more methodical, hated to lose anything he had once learned, and he thought he had rather have the good fairy give him the gift of recollecting all he had once learned. For my part I quite agree with Harry. There are a great many things that I have no desire to know. I do not want to know in what words the King of Ashantee says, “Cut off the heads of those women.” I do not want to know whether a centipede really has ninety-six legs or one hundred and four. I never did know. I never shall. I have no occasion to know. And I am glad not to have my mind lumbered up with the unnecessary information. On the other hand, that which I have once learned or read does in some way or other belong to my personal life. I am very glad if I can reproduce that in any way, and I am much obliged to anybody who will help me.

For reading, then, the first rules, I think, are: Do not read too much at a time; stop when you are tired; and, in whatever way, make some review of what you read, even as you go along.

Capel Lofft says, in quite an interesting book, which plays about the surface of things without going very deep, which he calls Self-Formation,[1]Self-Formation. Crosby and Nichols. Boston. 1845. [Footnote in the original. Copies may be found at archive.org from the here, among others.] that his whole life was changed, and indeed saved, when he learned that he must turn back, at the end of each sentence, ask himself what it meant, if he believed it or disbelieved it, and, so to speak, that he must pack it away as part of his mental furniture before he took in another sentence. That is just as a dentist jams one little bit of gold-foil home, and then another, and then another. He does not put one wad on the hollow tooth, and then crowd it all in. Capel Lofft says that this reflection—going forward as a serpent does, by a series of backward bends over the line—will make a dull book entertaining, and will make the reader master of every book he reads, through all time. For my part, I think this is cutting it rather fine, this chopping the book up into separate bits. I had rather read as one of my wisest counsellors did; he read, say a page, or a paragraph of a page or two, more or less; then he would look across at the wall, and consider the author’s statement, and fix it on his mind, and then read on. I do not do this, however. I read half an hour or an hour, till I am ready, perhaps, to put the book by. Then I examine myself. What has this amounted to? What does he say? What does he prove? Does he prove it? What is there new in it? Where did he get it? If it is necessary in such an examination you can go back over the passage, correct your first impression, if it is wrong, find out the meaning that the writer has carelessly concealed, and such a process makes it certain that you yourself will remember his thought or his statement.

I can remember, I think, everything I saw in Europe, which was worth seeing, if I saw it twice. But there was many a wonder which I was taken to see in the whirl of sight-seeing, of which I have no memory, and of which I cannot force any recollection. I remember that at Malines—what we call Mechlin—our train stopped nearly an hour. At the station a crowd of guides were shouting that there was time to go and see Rubens’s picture of ——, at the church of ——. This seemed to us a droll contrast to the cry at our stations, “Fifteen minutes for refreshments!” It offered such æsthetic refreshment in place of carnal oysters, that purely for the frolic we went to see. We were hurried across some sort of square into the church, saw the picture, admired it, came away, and forgot it,—clear and clean forgot it! My dear Laura, I do not know what it was about any more than you do. But if I had gone to that church the next day, and had seen it again, I should have fixed it forever on my memory. Moral: Renew your acquaintance with whatever you want to remember. I think Ingham says somewhere that it is the slight difference between the two stereoscopic pictures which gives to them, when one overlies the other, their relief and distinctness. If he does not say it, I will say it for him now.

I think it makes no difference how you make this mental review of the author, but I do think it essential that, as you pass from one division of his work to another, you should make it somehow.

Another good rule for memory is indispensable, I think,—namely, to read with a pencil in hand. If the book is your own, you had better make what I may call your own index to it on the hard white page which lines the cover at the end. That is, you can write down there just a hint of the things you will be apt to like to see again, noting the page on which they are. If the book is not your own, do this on a little slip of paper, which you may keep separately. These memoranda will be, of course, of all sorts of things. Thus they will be facts which you want to know, or funny stories which you think will amuse some one, or opinions which you may have a doubt about. Suppose you had got hold of that very rare book, “Veragas’s History of the Pacific Ocean and its Shores”; here might be your private index at the end of the first volume:—

Percentage of salt in water, 11: Gov. Revillagigedo, 19: Caciques and potatoes, 23: Lime water for scurvy, 29. Errata, Kanaka, ἀνηρ, ἀνα? 42: Magelhaens vs. Wilkes, 57: Coral insects, 72: Gigantic ferns, 84, &c., &c., &c.

Very likely you may never need one of these references; but if you do, it is certain that you will have no time to waste in hunting for them. Make your memorandum, and you are sure.

Bear in mind all along that each book will suggest other books which you are to read sooner or later. In your memoranda note with care the authors who are referred to of whom you know little or nothing, if you think you should like to know more, or ought to know more. Do not neglect this last condition, however. You do not make the memorandum to show it at the Philo-gabblian; you make it for yourself; and it means that you yourself need this additional information.

Whether to copy much from books or not? That is a question,—and the answer is,—“That depends.” If you have but few books, and much time and paper and ink; and if you are likely to have fewer books, why, nothing is nicer and better than to make for use in later life good extract-books to your own taste, and for your own purposes. But if you own your books, or are likely to have them at command, time is short, and the time spent in copying would probably be better spent in reading. There are some very diffusive books, difficult because diffusive, of which it is well to write close digests, if you are really studying them. When we read John Locke, for instance, we had to make abstracts, and we used to stint ourselves to a line for one of his chatty sections. That was good practice for writing, and we remember what was in the sections to this hour. If you copy, make a first-rate index to your extracts. They sell books prepared for the purpose, but you may just as well make your own.

You see I am not contemplating any very rapid or slap-dash work. You may put that on your novels, or books of amusement if you choose, and I will not be very cross about it; but for the books of improvement, I want you to improve by reading them. Do not “gobble” them up so that five years hence you shall not know whether you have read them or not. What I advise seems slow to you, but if you will, any of you, make or find two hours a day to read in this fashion, you will be one day accomplished men or women. Very few professional men, known to me, get so much time as that for careful and systematic reading. If any boy or girl wants really to know what comes of such reading, I wish he would read the life of my friend George Livermore, which our friend Charles Deane has just now written for the Historical Society of Massachusetts. There was a young man, who when he was a boy in a store began his systematic reading. He never left active and laborious business; but when he died, he was one of the accomplished historical scholars of America. He had no superior in his special lines of study; he was a recognized authority and leader among men who had given their lives to scholarship.

I have not room to copy it here, but I wish any of you would turn to a letter of Frederick Robertson’s, near the end of the second volume of his letters, where he speaks of this very matter. He says he read, when he was at Oxford, but sixteen books with his tutors. But he read them so that they became a part of himself, “as the iron enters a man’s blood.” And they were books by sixteen of the men who have been leaders of the world. No bad thing, dear Stephen, to have in your blood and brain and bone, the vitalizing element that was in the lives of such men.

I need not ask you to look forward so far as to the end of a life as long as Mr. George Livermore’s, and as successful. Without asking that, I will say again, what I implied in August, that any person who will take any special subject of detail, and in a well-provided library will work steadily on that little subject for a fortnight, will at the end of the fortnight probably know more of that detail than anybody in the country knows. If you will study by subjects for the truth, you have the satisfaction of knowing that the ground is soon very nearly all your own.

I do not pretend that books are everything. I may have occasion some day to teach some of you “How to Observe,” and then I shall say some very hard things about people who keep their books so close before their eyes that they cannot see God’s world, nor their fellow-men and women. But books rightly used are society. Good books are the best society; better than is possible without them, in any one place, or in any one time. To know how to use them wisely and well, is to know how to make Shakespeare and Milton and Theodore Hook and Thomas Hood step out from the side of your room, at your will, sit down at your fire, and talk with you for an hour. I have no such society at hand, as I write these words, except by such magic. Have you in your log-cabin in No. 7?

Edward E. Hale.