e sitting and that a short one. It is a great
misfortune to read only books that "must be returned within five days."
For my part, I should like to see in our public libraries, to offset the
shelves of such books, other shelves, labeled "Books that may and should
be kept out six months." I would have there Thackeray and George Eliot
and Wordsworth and Spenser, Malory and Homer and Cervantes and
Shakespeare and Montaigne--oh, they should be shelves to rejoice the
soul of the harassed reader!

No, if one can read but little, let him by all means read something big.
I know a woman occupied with the demands of a peculiarly exigent social
position. Finding her one day reading "The Tempest," I remarked on her
enterprise. "Not a bit!" she protested, "I am not reading it to be
enterprising, I am reading it to get rested. I find Shakespeare so
peaceful, compared with the magazines." I have another friend who is
taking entire charge of her children, besides doing a good deal of her
own housework and gardening. I discovered her one day sitting under a
tree, reading Matthew Arnold's poems, while the children played near by,
I ventured to comment on what seemed to me the incongruity of her choice
of a book. "But don't you see," she replied, quickly. "That is just why!
I am so busy from minute to minute doing lots of little practical,
temporary things, that I simply have to keep in touch with something
different--something large and quiet. If I didn't, I should die!"

I suppose in the old days, in a less "literary" age, all such busy folk
found this necessary rest and refreshment in a single book--the Bible.
Doubtless many still do so, but not so many; and this, quite
irrespective of religious considerations, seems to me a great pity. The
literary quality of the Scriptures has, to be sure, been partly vitiated
by the lamentable habit of reading them in isolated "texts," instead of
as magnificent wholes; yet, even so, I feel sure that this constant
intercourse with the Book did for our predecessors in far larger measure
what some of these other books of which I have been speaking do for
us--it furnished that contact with greatness which we all crave.

It may be accident, though I hardly think so, that to find such books we
must turn to the past. Doubtless others will arise in the
future--possibly some are even now being brought to birth, though this I
find hard to believe. For ours is the age of the short-story--a
wonderful product,