ty on this planet who considers only the physical or what is
called the practical. He is a man only half developed. I can conceive no
more dreary existence than that of a man who is past the period of
business activity, and who cannot, for his entertainment, his happiness,
draw upon the great reservoir of literature. For what did I come into
this world if I am to be like a stake planted in a fence, and not like a
tree visited by all the winds of heaven and the birds of the air?

Those who concern themselves with the printed matter in books and
periodicals are often in despair over the volume of it, and their actual
inability to keep up with current literature. They need not worry. If all
that appears in books, under the pressure of publishers and the ambition
of experimenters in writing, were uniformly excellent, no reader would be
under any more obligation to read it than he is to see every individual
flower and blossoming shrub. Specimens of the varieties would suffice.
But a vast proportion of it is the product of immature minds, and of a
yearning for experience rather than a knowledge of life. There is no more
obligation on the part of the person who would be well informed and
cultivated to read all this than there is to read all the colored
incidents, personal gossip, accidents, and crimes repeated daily, with
sameness of effect, in the newspapers, some of the most widely circulated
of which are a composite of the police gazette and the comic almanac. A
great deal of the reading done is mere contagion, one form or another of
communicated grippe, and it is consoling and even surprising to know that
if you escape the run of it for a season, you have lost nothing
appreciable. Some people, it has been often said, make it a rule never to
read a book until it is from one to five years old, By this simple device
they escape the necessity of reading most of them, but this is only a
part of their gain. Considering the fact that the world is full of books
of the highest value for cultivation, entertainment, and information,
which the utmost leisure we can spare from other pressing avocations does
not suffice to give us knowledge of, it does seem to be little less than
a moral and intellectual sin to flounder about blindly in the flood of
new publications. I am speaking, of course, of the general mass of
readers, and not of the specialists who must follow their subjects with
ceaseless inquisition. But for most of us who belong