tenderest heart can need. Yes, certainly:
Read books that come to stay--the kind of books you would like to be
as a man.

The Rubaiyat would deserve mention but for the danger of
misunderstanding its message. Rightly read Omar Khayyam's lesson is
serenity and poise and that power and happiness which come from these.
The disciple of the tent-maker is not apt to lose his bearings. He no
longer regards to-day as eternity, no longer looks at the world and
the universe from himself as a center. Reject the Persian poet's
apotheosis of wine, absorb his philosophy of calmness, and you will do
your duty regardless of consequences. And that is the chief thing, is
it not?

Do your duty, have the courage of your thought, and walk off with the
old fatalist's verse soothing your soul and brain, and let the
disturbed ones clamor. The clamor will cease in time and turn to
applause. And whether it does or not is a matter of absolutely no
importance if you have done right.

There is nothing which will more conserve the nervous forces of any
serious-minded young man, nothing which will give him so much of that
composure of mind and necessary concentration of powers, as the
resolution to do his best and let it go at that, whether the world
applaud, or laugh, or rage. Be true to your deed, whatever it may have
been, and if the deed was true, the end must necessarily be
satisfactory.

Burns, of course, we must read. We must have him to keep the milk of
human kindness flowing in our veins--to keep sweet and sincere and
loving. The good that you get from Burns cannot be analyzed. You
cannot say, "I have read Burns, and find in him of wisdom so many
grains, of humor so many grains, of beauty of expression so many
grains," and so forth and so on to the end.

It is the general effect of Burns that is so valuable, so
indispensable. Read a little bit of Burns every day, and you will find
it very hard to be unkind; you are conscious that you are more human.
A mellow and delightful sympathy for your fellow man--aye, and for all
living things--warms your heart. And this human quality is more
valuable than all the riches of all the lords of wealth.

At all cost keep your capacity for human sympathy.

The sharp, hard processes of our strictly business civilization tend
to regulate even our sympathies into a system. It is as if we should
say each day, "I have time to-day for five minutes of human sympathy,"
and promptly push the button of our