BOOKS.

It is easy to accuse books, and bad ones are easily found, and the

best are but records, and not the things recorded; and certainly

there is dilettanteism enough, and books that are merely neutral and

do nothing for us. In Plato's "Gorgias," Socrates says, "The

ship-master walks in a modest garb near the sea, after bringing his

passengers from Aegina or from Pontus, not thinking he has done

anything extraordinary, and certainly knowing that his passengers are

the same, and in no respect better than when he took them on board."

So is it with books, for the most part; they work no redemption in us.

The bookseller might certainly know that his customers are in no

respect better for the purchase and consumption of his wares. The

volume is dear at a dollar, and, after reading to weariness the

lettered backs, we leave the shop with a sigh, and learn, as I did,

without surprise, of a surly bank-director, that in bank parlors

they estimate all stocks of this kind as rubbish.

But it is not less true that there are books which are of that

importance in a man's private experience, as to verify for him the

fables of Cornelius Agrippa, of Michael Scott, or of the old Orpheus

of Thrace; books which take rank in our life with parents and lovers

and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so

revolutionary, so authoritative; books which are the work and the

proof of faculties so comprehensive, so nearly equal to the world

which they paint, that, though one shuts them with meaner ones, he

feels his exclusion from them to accuse his way of living.

Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of

the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil

countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results

of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and

inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by

etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom

friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers

of another age.

We owe to books those general benefits which come from high

intellectual action. Thus, I think, we often owe to them the

perception of immortality. They impart sympathetic activity to the

moral power. Go with mean people, and you think life is mean. Then

read Plutarch, and the world is a proud place, peopled with men of

positive quality, with heroes and demigods standing around us who

will not let us sleep. Then, they address the imagination; only

poetry inspires poetry. They become the organic culture of the time.

College education is the reading of certain books which the common

sense of all scholars agrees will represent the science already

accumulated. If you know that,--for instance, in geometry, if you

have read Euclid and Laplace,--your opinion has some value; if you

do not know these, you are not entitled to give any opinion on the

subject. Whenever any skeptic or bigot claims to be heard on the

questions of intellect and morals, we ask if he is familiar with the

books of Plato, where all his pert objections have once for all been

disposed of. If not, he has no right to our time. Let him go and

find himself answered there.

Meantime, the colleges, whilst they provide us with libraries,

furnish no professor of books; and, I think, no chair is so much

wanted. In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear

friends, but they are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and

leathern boxes; and though they know us, and have been waiting two,

ten, or twenty centuries for us,--some of them,--and are eager to

give us a sign, and unbosom themselves, it is the law of their limbo

that they must not speak until spoken to; and as the enchanter has

dressed them like battalions of infantry in coat and jacket of one

cut, by the thousand and ten thousand, your chance of hitting on the

right one is to be computed by the arithmetical rule of Permutation

and Combination,--not a choice out of three caskets, but out of half

a million caskets, all alike. But it happens in our experience, that

in this lottery there are at least fifty or a hundred blanks to a

prize. It seems, then, as if some charitable soul, after losing a

great deal of time among the false books, and alighting upon a few

true ones which made him happy and wise, would do a right act in

naming those which have been bridges or ships to carry him safely

over dark morasses and barren oceans, into the heart of sacred cities,

into palaces and temples. This would be best done by those great

masters of books who from time to time appear,--the Fabricii, the

Seldens, Magliabecchis, Scaligers, Mirandolas, Bayles, Johnsons,

whose eyes sweep the whole horizon of learning. But private readers,

reading purely for love of the book, would serve us by leaving each

the shortest note of what he found.

There are books, and it is practicable to read them, because they

are so few. We look over with a sigh the monumental libraries of

Paris, of the Vatican, and the British Museum. In the Imperial

Library at Paris, it is commonly said, there are six hundred

thousand volumes, and nearly as many manuscripts; and perhaps the

number of extant printed books may be as many as these numbers united,

or exceeding a million. It is easy to count the number of pages

which a diligent man can read in a day, and the number of years

which human life in favorable circumstances allows to reading; and

to demonstrate, that, though he should read from dawn till dark, for

sixty years, he must die in the first alcoves. But nothing can be

more deceptive than this arithmetic, where none but a natural method

is really pertinent. I visit occasionally the Cambridge Library, and

I can seldom go there without renewing the conviction that the best

of it all is already within the four walls of my study at home. The

inspection of the catalogue brings me continually back to the few

standard writers who are on every private shelf; and to these it can

afford only the most slight and casual additions. The crowds and

centuries of books are only commentary and elucidation, echoes and

weakeners of these few great voices of Time.

The best rule of reading will be a method from nature, and not a

mechanical one of hours and pages. It holds each student to a

pursuit of his native aim, instead of a desultory miscellany. Let

him read what is proper to him, and not waste his memory on a crowd

of mediocrities. As whole nations have derived their culture from a

single book,--as the Bible has been the literature as well as the

religion of large portions of Europe,--as Hafiz was the eminent

genius of the Persians, Confucius of the Chinese, Cervantes of the

Spaniards; so, perhaps, the human mind would be a gainer, if all the

secondary writers were lost,--say, in England, all but Shakspeare,

Milton, and Bacon, through the profounder study so drawn to those

wonderful minds. With this pilot of his own genius, let the

student read one, or let him read many, he will read advantageously.

Dr. Johnson said, "Whilst you stand deliberating which book your son

shall read first, another boy has read both: read anything five

hours a day, and you will soon be learned."

Nature is much our friend in this matter. Nature is always

clarifying her water and her wine. No filtration can be so perfect.

She does the same thing by books as by her gases and plants. There

is always a selection in writers, and then a selection from the

selection. In the first place, all books that get fairly into the

vital air of the world were written by the successful class, by the

affirming and advancing class, who utter what tens of thousands feel,

though they cannot say. There has already been a scrutiny and choice

from many hundreds of young pens, before the pamphlet or political

chapter which you read in a fugitive journal comes to your eye. All

these are young adventurers, who produce their performance to the

wise ear of Time, who sits and weighs, and ten years hence out of a

million of pages reprints one. Again it is judged, it is winnowed by

all the winds of opinion, and what terrific selection has not passed

on it, before it can be reprinted after twenty years, and reprinted

after a century!--it is as if Minos and Rhadamanthus had indorsed

the writing. 'Tis therefore an economy of time to read old and famed

books. Nothing can be preserved which is not good; and I know

beforehand that Pindar, Martial, Terence, Galen, Kepler, Galileo,

Bacon, Erasmus, More, will be superior to the average intellect. In

contemporaries, it is not so easy to distinguish betwixt notoriety

and fame.

Be sure, then, to read no mean books. Shun the spawn of the press on

the gossip of the hour. Do not read what you shall learn without

asking, in the street and the train. Dr. Johnson said, "he always

went into stately shops"; and good travellers stop at the best hotels;

for, though they cost more, they do not cost much more, and there is

the good company and the best information. In like manner, the

scholar knows that the famed books contain, first and last, the best

thoughts and facts. Now and then, by rarest luck, in some foolish

Grub Street is the gem we want. But in the best circles is the best

information. If you should transfer the amount of your reading day

by day in the newspaper to the standard authors,--but who dare speak

of such a thing?

The three practical rules, then, which I have to offer, are,

1. Never read any book that is not a year old.

2. Never read any but famed books.

3. Never read any but what you like; or, in Shakespeare's phrase,

"No profit goes where is no pleasure ta'en;

In brief, Sir, study what you most affect."

Montaigne says, "Books are a languid pleasure"; but I find certain

books vital and spermatic, not leaving the reader what he was; he

shuts the book a richer man. I would never willingly read any others

than such. And I will venture, at the risk of inditing a list of old

primers and grammars, to count the few books which a superficial

reader must thankfully use.

Of the old Greek books, I think there are five which we cannot spare:--

1. Homer, who, in spite of Pope, and all the learned uproar of

centuries, has really the true fire, and is good for simple minds,

is the true and adequate germ of Greece, and occupies that place as

history, which nothing can supply. It holds through all literature,

that our best history is still poetry. It is so in Hebrew, in

Sanscrit, and in Greek. English history is best known through

Shakspeare; how much through Merlin, Robin Hood, and the Scottish

ballads! the German, through the Nibelungen Lied; the Spanish,

through the Cid. Of Homer, George Chapman's is the heroic translation,

though the most literal prose version is the best of all.--2.

Herodotus, whose history contains inestimable anecdotes, which

brought it with the learned into a sort of disesteem; but in these

days, when it is found that what is most memorable of history is a

few anecdotes, and that we need not be alarmed, though we should

find it not dull, it is regaining credit.--3. Aeschylus, the

grandest of the three tragedians, who has given us under a thin veil

the first plantation of Europe. The "Prometheus" is a poem of the

like dignity and scope as the book of Job, or the Norse "Edda."--4.

Of Plato I hesitate to speak, lest there should be no end. You find

in him that which you have already found in Homer, now ripened to

thought,--the poet converted to a philosopher, with loftier strains

of musical wisdom than Homer reached, as if Homer were the youth,

and Plato the finished man; yet with no less security of bold and

perfect song, when he cares to use it, and with some harpstrings

fetched from a higher heaven. He contains the future, as he came out

of the past. In Plato, you explore modern Europe in its causes and

seed,--all that in thought, which the history of Europe embodies or

has yet to embody. The well-informed man finds himself anticipated.

Plato is up with him, too. Nothing has escaped him. Every new crop

in the fertile harvest of reform, every fresh suggestion of modern

humanity is there. If the student wish to see both sides, and

justice done to the man of the world, pitiless exposure of pedants,

and the supremacy of truth and the religious sentiment, he shall be

contented also. Why should not young men be educated on this book?

It would suffice for the tuition of the race,--to test their

understanding, and to express their reason. Here is that which is so

attractive to all men,--the literature of aristocracy shall I call it?--

the picture of the best persons, sentiments, and manners, by the

first master, in the best times,--portraits of Pericles, Alcibiades,

Crito, Prodicus, Protagoras, Anaxagoras, and Socrates, with the

lovely background of the Athenian and suburban landscape. Or who can

overestimate the images with which he has enriched the minds of men,

and which pass like bullion in the currency of all nations? Read the

"Phaedo," the "Protagoras," the "Phaedrus," the "Timaeus," the

"Republic," and the "Apology of Socrates." 5. Plutarch cannot be

spared from the smallest library: first, because he is so readable,

which is much; then, that he is medicinal and invigorating. The

Lives of Cimon, Lycurgus, Alexander, Demosthenes, Phocion, Marcellus

and the rest, are what history has of best. But this book has taken

care of itself, and the opinion of the world is expressed in the

innumerable cheap editions, which make it as accessible as a

newspaper. But Plutarch's "Morals" is less known, and seldom

reprinted. Yet such a reader as I am writing to can as ill spare it

as the "Lives." He will read in it the essays "On the Daemon of

Socrates," "On Isis and Osiris," "On Progress in Virtue," "On

Garrulity," "On Love," and thank anew the art of printing, and the

cheerful domain of ancient thinking. Plutarch charms by the facility

of his associations; so that it signifies little where you open his

book, you find yourself at the Olympian tables. His memory is like

the Isthmian Games, where all that was excellent in Greece was

assembled, and you are stimulated and recruited by lyric verses, by

philosophic sentiments, by the forms and behavior of heroes, by the

worship of the gods, and by the passing of fillets, parsley and

laurel wreaths, chariots, armor, sacred cups, and utensils of

sacrifice. An inestimable trilogy of ancient social pictures are the

three "Banquets" respectively of Plato, Xenophon, and Plutarch.

Plutarch's has the least claim to historical accuracy; but the

meeting of the Seven Wise Masters is a charming portraiture of

ancient manners and discourse, and is as dear as the voice of a fife,

and entertaining as a French novel. Xenophon's delineation of

Athenian manners is an accessory to Plato, and supplies traits of

Socrates; whilst Plato's has merits of every kind,--being a

repertory of the wisdom of the ancients on the subject of love,--a

picture of a feast of wits, not less descriptive than Aristophanes,--

and, lastly, containing that ironical eulogy of Socrates which is

the source from which all the portraits of that head current in

Europe have been drawn.

Of course, a certain outline should be obtained of Greek history, in

which the important moments and persons can be rightly set down; but

the shortest is the best, and, if one lacks stomach for Mr. Grote's

voluminous annals, the old slight and popular summary of Goldsmith

or Gillies will serve. The valuable part is the age of Pericles, and

the next generation. And here we must read the "Clouds" of

Aristophanes, and what more of that master we gain appetite for, to

learn our way in the streets of Athens, and to know the tyranny of

Aristophanes, requiring more genius and sometimes not less cruelty

than belonged to the official commanders. Aristophanes is now very

accessible, with much valuable commentary, through the labors of

Mitchell and Cartwright. An excellent popular book is J. A. St.

John's "Ancient Greece"; the "Life and Letters" of Niebuhr, even

more than his Lectures, furnish leading views; and Winckelmann, a

Greek born out of due time, has become essential to an intimate

knowledge of the Attic genius. The secret of the recent histories in

German and in English is the discovery, owed first to Wolff, and

later to Boeckh, that the sincere Greek history of that period must

be drawn from Demosthenes, specially from the business orations, and

from the comic poets.

If we come down a little by natural steps from the master to the

disciples, we have, six or seven centuries later, the Platonists,--

who also cannot be skipped,--Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, Synesius,

Jamblichus. Of Jamblichus the Emperor Julian said, "that he was

posterior to Plato in time, not in genius." Of Plotinus, we have

eulogies by Porphyry and Longinus, and the favor of the Emperor

Gallienus,--indicating the respect he inspired among his

contemporaries. If any one who had read with interest the "Isis and

Osiris" of Plutarch should then read a chapter called "Providence,"

by Synesius, translated into English by Thomas Taylor, he will find

it one of the majestic remains of literature, and, like one walking

in the noblest of temples, will conceive new gratitude to his

fellowmen, and a new estimate of their nobility. The imaginative

scholar will find few stimulants to his brain like these writers. He

has entered the Elysian Fields; and the grand and pleasing figures

of gods and daemons and demoniacal men, of the "azonic" and the

"aquatic gods," daemons with fulgid eyes, and all the rest of the

Platonic rhetoric, exalted a little under the African sun, sail

before his eyes. The acolyte has mounted the tripod over the cave at

Delphi; his heart dances, his sight is quickened. These guides speak

of the gods with such depth and with such pictorial details, as if

they had been bodily present at the Olympian feasts. The reader of

these books makes new acquaintance with his own mind; new regions of

thought are opened. Jamblichus's "Life of Pythagoras" works more

directly on the will than the others; since Pythagoras was eminently

a practical person, the founder of a school of ascetics and

socialists, a planter of colonies, and nowise a man of abstract

studies alone.

The respectable and sometimes excellent translations of Bohn's

Library have done for literature what railroads have done for

internal intercourse. I do not hesitate to read all the books I have

named, and all good books, in translations. What is really best in

any book is translatable,--any real insight or broad human sentiment.

Nay, I observe, that, in our Bible, and other books of lofty moral

tone, it seems easy and inevitable to render the rhythm and music of

the original into phrases of equal melody. The Italians have a fling

at translators, _i traditori traduttori_, but I thank them. I rarely

read any Latin, Greek, German, Italian, sometimes not a French book

in the original, which I can procure in a good version. I like to be

beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which

receives tributaries from every region under heaven. I should as

soon think of swimming across Charles River, when I wish to go to

Boston, as of reading all my books in originals, when I have them

rendered for me in my mother tongue.

For history, there is great choice of ways to bring the student

through early Rome. If he can read Livy, he has a good book; but one

of the short English compends, some Goldsmith or Ferguson, should be

used, that will place in the cycle the bright stars of Plutarch. The

poet Horace is the eye of the Augustan age; Tacitus, the wisest of

historians; and Martial will give him Roman manners, and some very

bad ones, in the early days of the Empire: but Martial must be read,

if read at all, in his own tongue. These will bring him to Gibbon,

who will take him in charge, and convey him with abundant

entertainment down--with notice of all remarkable objects on the way--

through fourteen hundred years of time. He cannot spare Gibbon, with

his vast reading, with such wit and continuity of mind, that, though

never profound, his book is one of the conveniences of civilization,

like the proposed railroad from New York to the Pacific,--and, I

think, will be sure to send the reader to his "Memoirs of Himself,"

and the "Extracts from my Journal," and "Abstracts of my Readings,"

which will spur the laziest scholar to emulation of his prodigious

performance.

Now having our idler safe down as far as the fall of Constantinople

in 1453, he is in very good courses; for here are trusty hands

waiting for him. The cardinal facts of European history are soon

learned. There is Dante's poem, to open the Italian Republics of the

Middle Age; Dante's "Vita Nuova," to explain Dante and Beatrice; and

Boccaccio's "Life of Dante,"--a great man to describe a greater. To

help us, perhaps a volume or two of M. Sismondi's "Italian Republics"

will be as good as the entire sixteen. When we come to Michel Angelo,

his Sonnets and Letters must be read, with his Life by Vasari, or,

in our day, by Mr. Duppa. For the Church, and the Feudal Institution,

Mr. Hallam's "Middle Ages" will furnish, if superficial, yet

readable and conceivable outlines.

The "Life of the Emperor Charles V.," by the useful Robertson, is

still the key of the following age. Ximenes, Columbus, Loyola, Luther,

Erasmus, Melancthon, Francis I., Henry VIII., Elizabeth, and Henry IV.

of France, are his contemporaries. It is a time of seeds and

expansions, whereof our recent civilization is the fruit.

If now the relations of England to European affairs bring him to

British ground, he is arrived at the very moment when modern history

takes new proportions. He can look back for the legends and

mythology to the "Younger Edda" and the "Heimrskringla" of Snorro

Sturleson, to Mallet's "Northern Antiquities," to Ellis's "Metrical

Romances," to Asser's "Life of Alfred," and Venerable Bede, and to

the researches of Sharon Turner and Palgrave. Hume will serve him

for an intelligent guide, and in the Elizabethan era he is at the

richest period of the English mind, with the chief men of action and

of thought which that nation has produced, and with a pregnant

future before him. Here he has Shakspeare, Spenser, Sidney, Raleigh,

Bacon, Chapman, Jonson, Ford, Beaumont and Fletcher, Herbert, Donne,

Herrick; and Milton, Marvell, and Dryden, not long after.

In reading history, he is to prefer the history of individuals. He

will not repent the time he gives to Bacon,--not if he read the

"Advancement of Learning," the "Essays," the "Novum Organon," the

"History of Henry VII.," and then all the "Letters," (especially

those to the Earl of Devonshire, explaining the Essex business,) and

all but his "Apophthegms."

The task is aided by the strong mutual light which these men shed on

each other. Thus, the Works of Ben Jonson are a sort of hoop to bind

all these fine persons together, and to the land to which they belong.

He has written verses to or on all his notable contemporaries; and

what with so many occasional poems, and the portrait sketches in his

"Discoveries," and the gossiping record of his opinions in his

conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden, has really illustrated

the England of his time, if not to the same extent, yet much in the

same way, as Walter Scott has celebrated the persons and places of

Scotland. Walton, Chapman, Herrick, and Sir Henry Wotton write also

to the times.

Among the best books are certain _Autobiographies_: as, St.

Augustine's Confessions; Benvenuto Cellini's Life; Montaigne's Essays;

Lord Herbert of Cherbury's Memoirs; Memoirs of the Cardinal de Retz;

Rousseau's Confessions; Linnaeus's Diary; Gibbon's, Hume's, Franklin's,

Burns's, Alfieri's, Goethe's, and Haydon's Autobiographies.

Another class of books closely allied to these, and of like interest,

are those which may be called _Table-Talks_; of which the best are

Saadi's Gulistan; Luther's Table-Talk; Aubrey's Lives; Spence's

Anecdotes; Selden's Table-Talk; Boswell's Life of Johnson;

Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe; Coleridge's Table-Talk; and

Hazlitt's Life of Northcote.

There is a class whose value I should designate as favorites; such

as Froissart's Chronicles; Southey's Chronicle of the Cid; Cervantes;

Sully's Memoirs; Rabelais; Montaigne; Izaak Walton; Evelyn; Sir

Thomas Browne; Aubrey; Sterne; Horace Walpole; Lord Clarendon;

Doctor Johnson; Burke, shedding floods of light on his times; Lamb;

Landor; and De Quincey;--a list, of course, that may easily be

swelled, as dependent on individual caprice. Many men are as tender

and irritable as lovers in reference to these predilections. Indeed,

a man's library is a sort of harem, and I observe that tender

readers have a great prudencey in showing their books to a stranger.

The annals of bibliography afford many examples of the delirious

extent to which book-fancying can go, when the legitimate delight in

a book is transferred to a rare edition or to a manuscript. This

mania reached its height about the beginning of the present century.

For an autograph of Shakspeare one hundred and fifty-five guineas

were given. In May, 1812, the library of the Duke of Roxburgh was

sold. The sale lasted forty-two days,--we abridge the story from

Dibdin,--and among the many curiosities was a copy of Boccaccio

published by Valdarfer, at Venice, in 1471; the only perfect copy of

this edition. Among the distinguished company which attended the

sale were the Duke of Devonshire, Earl Spencer, and the Duke of

Marlborough, then Marquis of Blandford. The bid stood at five hundred

guineas. "A thousand guineas," said Earl Spencer: "And ten," added

the Marquis. You might hear a pin drop. All eyes were bent on the

bidders. Now they talked apart, now ate a biscuit, now made a bet,

but without the least thought of yielding one to the other.

"Two thousand pounds," said the Marquis. The Earl Spencer bethought

him like a prudent general of useless bloodshed and waste of powder,

and had paused a quarter of a minute, when Lord Althorp with long

steps came to his side, as if to bring his father a fresh lance to

renew the fight. Father and son whispered together, and Earl Spencer

exclaimed, "Two thousand two hundred and fifty pounds!" An electric

shock went through the assembly. "And ten," quietly added the Marquis.

There ended the strife. Ere Evans let the hammer fall, he paused;

the ivory instrument swept the air; the spectators stood dumb, when

the hammer fell. The stroke of its fall sounded on the farthest

shores of Italy. The tap of that hammer was heard in the libraries

of Rome, Milan, and Venice. Boccaccio stirred in his sleep of five

hundred years, and M. Van Praet groped in vain amidst the royal

alcoves in Paris, to detect a copy of the famed Valdarfer Boccaccio.

Another class I distinguish by the term _Vocabularies_. Burton's

"Anatomy of Melancholy" is a book of great learning. To read it is

like reading in a dictionary. 'Tis an inventory to remind us how

many classes and species of facts exist, and, in observing into what

strange and multiplex by-ways learning has strayed, to infer our

opulence. Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no

cant in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestion,--

the raw material of possible poems and histories. Nothing is wanting

but a little shuffling, sorting, ligature, and cartilage. Out of a

hundred examples, Cornelius Agrippa "On the Vanity of Arts and

Sciences" is a specimen of that scribatious-ness which grew to be

the habit of the gluttonous readers of his time. Like the modern

Germans, they read a literature, whilst other mortals read a few

books. They read voraciously, and must disburden themselves; so they

take any general topic, as, Melancholy, or Praise of Science, or

Praise of Folly, and write and quote without method or end. Now and

then out of that affluence of their learning comes a fine sentence

from Theophrastus, or Seneca, or Boëthius, but no high method, no

inspiring efflux. But one cannot afford to read for a few sentences;

they are good only as strings of suggestive words.

There is another class more needful to the present age, because the

currents of custom run now in another direction, and leave us dry on

this side;--I mean the _Imaginative_. A right metaphysics should do

justice to the coördinate powers of Imagination, Insight,

Understanding, and Will. Poetry, with its aids of Mythology and

Romance, must be well allowed for an imaginative creature. Men are

ever lapsing into a beggarly habit, wherein everything that is not

ciphering, that is, which does not serve the tyrannical animal, is

hustled out of sight. Our orators and writers are of the same poverty,

and, in this rag-fair, neither the Imagination, the great awakening

power, nor the Morals, creative of genius and of men, are addressed.

But though orator and poet are of this hunger party, the capacities

remain. We must have symbols. The child asks you for a story, and is

thankful for the poorest. It is not poor to him, but radiant with

meaning. The man asks for a novel,--that is, asks leave, for a few

hours, to be a poet, and to paint things as they ought to be. The

youth asks for a poem. The very dunces wish to go to the theatre.

What private heavens can we not open, by yielding to all the

suggestion of rich music! We must have idolatries, mythologies, some

swing and verge for the creative power lying coiled and cramped here,

driving ardent natures to insanity and crime, if it do not find vent.

Without the great and beautiful arts which speak to the sense of

beauty, a man seems to me a poor, naked, shivering creature. These

are his becoming draperies, which warm and adorn him. Whilst the

prudential and economical tone of society starves the imagination,

affronted Nature gets such indemnity as she may. The novel is that

allowance and frolic the imagination finds. Everything else pins it

down, and men flee for redress to Byron, Scott, Disraeli, Dumas, Sand,

Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, and Reade. Their education is neglected;

but the circulating library and the theatre, as well as the

trout-fishing, the Notch Mountains, the Adirondac country, the tour

to Mont Blanc, to the White Hills, and the Ghauts, make such amends

as they can.

The imagination infuses a certain volatility and intoxication. It

has a flute which sets the atoms of our frame in a dance, like

planets, and, once so liberated, the whole man reeling drunk to the

music, they never quite subside to their old stony state. But what

is the Imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy;

only the precursor of the Reason. And books that treat the old

pedantries of the world, our times, places, professions, customs,

opinions, histories, with a certain freedom, and distribute things,

not after the usages of America and Europe, but after the laws of

right reason, and with as daring a freedom as we use in dreams, put

us on our feet again, enable us to form an original judgment of our

duties, and suggest new thoughts for to-morrow.

"Lucrezia Floriani," "Le Péché de M. Antoine," "Jeanne," of George

Sand, are great steps from the novel of one termination, which we

all read twenty years ago. Yet how far off from life and manners and

motives the novel still is! Life lies about us dumb; the day, as we

know it, has not yet found a tongue. These stories are to the plots

of real life what the figures in "La Belle Assemblée," which

represent the fashion of the month, are to portraits. But the novel

will find the way to our interiors one day, and will not always be

the novel of costume merely. I do not think them inoperative now. So

much novel-reading cannot leave the young men and maidens untouched;

and doubtless it gives some ideal dignity to the day. The young

study noble behavior; and as the player in "Consuelo" insists that

he and his colleagues on the boards have taught princes the fine

etiquette and strokes of grace and dignity which they practise with

so much effect in their villas and among their dependents, so I

often see traces of the Scotch or the French novel in the courtesy

and brilliancy of young midshipmen, collegians, and clerks. Indeed,

when one observes how ill and ugly people make their loves and

quarrels, 'tis pity they should not read novels a little more, to

import the fine generosities, and the clear, firm conduct, which are

as becoming in the unions and separations which love effects under

shingle roofs as in palaces and among illustrious personages.

In novels the most serious questions are really beginning to be

discussed. What made the popularity of "Jane Eyre," but that a

central question was answered in some sort? The question there

answered in regard to a vicious marriage will always be treated

according to the habit of the party. A person of commanding

individualism will answer it as Rochester does,--as Cleopatra, as

Milton, as George Sand do,--magnifying the exception into a rule,

dwarfing the world into an exception. A person of less courage, that

is, of less constitution, will answer as the heroine does,--giving

way to fate, to conventionalism, to the actual state and doings of

men and women.

For the most part, our novel-reading is a passion for results. We

admire parks, and high-born beauties, and the homage of drawing-rooms,

and parliaments. They make us skeptical, by giving prominence to

wealth and social position.

I remember when some peering eyes of boys discovered that the

oranges hanging on the boughs of an orange-tree in a gay piazza were

tied to the twigs by thread. I fear 'tis so with the novelist's

prosperities. Nature has a magic by which she fits the man to his

fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character. But the novelist

plucks this event here, and that fortune there, and ties them rashly

to his figures, to tickle the fancy of his readers with a cloying

success, or scare them with shocks of tragedy. And so, on the whole,

'tis a juggle. We are cheated into laughter or wonder by feats which

only oddly combine acts that we do every day. There is no new element,

no power, no furtherance. 'Tis only confectionery, not the raising

of new corn. Great is the poverty of their inventions. _She was

beautiful, and he fell in love_. Money, and killing, and the

Wandering Jew, and persuading the lover that his mistress is

betrothed to another,--these are the mainsprings; new names, but no

new qualities in the men and women. Hence the vain endeavor to keep

any bit of this fairy gold, which has rolled like a brook through

our hands. A thousand thoughts awoke; great rainbows seemed to span

the sky; a morning among the mountains;--but we close the book, and

not a ray remains in the memory of evening. But this passion for

romance, and this disappointment, show how much we need real

elevations and pure poetry; that which shall show us, in morning and

night, in stars and mountains, and in all the plight and

circumstance of men, the analogons of our own thoughts, and a like

impression made by a just book and by the face of Nature.

If our times are sterile in genius, we must cheer us with books of

rich and believing men who had atmosphere and amplitude about them.

Every good fable, every mythology, every biography out of a

religious age, every passage of love, and even philosophy and science,

when they proceed from an intellectual integrity, and are not

detached and critical, have the imaginative element. The Greek fables,

the Persian history, (Firdousi,) the "Younger Edda" of the

Scandinavians, the "Chronicle of the Cid," the poem of Dante, the

Sonnets of Michel Angelo, the English drama of Shakspeare, Beaumont

and Fletcher, and Ford, and even the prose of Bacon and Milton,--in

our time, the ode of Wordsworth, and the poems and the prose of

Goethe, have this richness, and leave room for hope and for generous

attempts.

There is no room left,--and yet I might as well not have begun as

to leave out a class of books which are the best: I mean the Bibles

of the world, or the sacred books of each nation, which express for

each the supreme result of their experience. After the Hebrew and

Greek Scriptures, which constitute the sacred books of Christendom,

these are, the Desatir of the Persians, and the Zoroastrian Oracles;

the Vedas and Laws of Menu; the Upanishads, the Vishnu Purana, the

Bhagvat Geeta, of the Hindoos; the books of the Buddhists; the

"Chinese Classic," of four books, containing the wisdom of Confucius

and Mencius. Also such other books as have acquired a semi-canonical

authority in the world, as expressing the highest sentiment and hope

of nations. Such are the "Hermes Trismegistus," pretending to be

Egyptian remains; the "Sentences" of Epictetus; of Marcus Antoninus;

the "Vishnu Sarma" of the Hindoos; the "Gulistan" of Saadi; the

"Imitation of Christ," of Thomas à Kempis; and the "Thoughts" of

Pascal.

All these books are the majestic expressions of the universal

conscience, and are more to our daily purpose than this year's

almanac or this day's newspaper. But they are for the closet, and to

be read on the bended knee. Their communications are not to be given

or taken with the lips and the end of the tongue, but out of the

glow of the cheek, and with the throbbing heart. Friendship should

give and take, solitude and time brood and ripen, heroes absorb and

enact them. They are not to be held by letters printed on a page, but

are living characters translatable into every tongue and form of life.

I read them on lichens and bark; I watch them on waves on the beach;

they fly in birds, they creep in worms; I detect them in laughter

and blushes and eye-sparkles of men and women. These are Scriptures

which the missionary might well carry over prairie, desert, and ocean,

to Siberia, Japan, Timbuctoo. Yet he will find that the spirit which

is in them journeys faster than he, and greets him on his arrival,--

was there already long before him. The missionary must be carried by

it, and find it there, or he goes in vain. Is there any geography in

these things? We call them Asiatic, we call them primeval; but

perhaps that is only optical; for Nature is always equal to herself,

and there are as good pairs of eyes and ears now in the planet as

ever were. Only these ejaculations of the soul are uttered one or a

few at a time, at long intervals, and it takes millenniums to make a

Bible.

These are a few of the books which the old and the later times have

yielded us, which will reward the time spent on them. In comparing

the number of good books with the shortness of life, many might well

be read by proxy, if we had good proxies; and it would be well for

sincere young men to borrow a hint from the French Institute and the

British Association, and, as they divide the whole body into sections,

each of which sit upon and report of certain matters confided to them,

so let each scholar associate himself to such persons as he can rely

on, in a literary club, in which each shall undertake a single work

or series for which he is qualified. For example, how attractive is

the whole literature of the "Roman de la Rose," the "Fabliaux," and

the _gai science_ of the French Troubadours! Yet who in Boston has

time for that? But one of our company shall undertake it, shall

study and master it, and shall report on it, as under oath; shall

give us the sincere result, as it lies in his mind, adding nothing,

keeping nothing back. Another member, meantime, shall as honestly

search, sift, and as truly report on British mythology, the Round

Table, the histories of Brut, Merlin, and Welsh poetry; a third, on

the Saxon Chronicles, Robert of Gloucester, and William of Malmesbury;

a fourth, on Mysteries, Early Drama, "Gesta Romanorum," Collier, and

Dyce, and the Camden Society. Each shall give us his grains of gold,

after the washing; and every other shall then decide whether this is

a book indispensable to him also.