ntless numbers like
flies; merely because these writings have been printed to-day and are
still wet from the press. It would be better if they were thrown on one
side and rejected the day they appeared, as they must be after the lapse
of a few years. They will then afford material for laughter as
illustrating the follies of a former time.

It is because people will only read what is _the newest_ instead of what
is the best of all ages, that writers remain in the narrow circle of
prevailing ideas, and that the age sinks deeper and deeper in its own
mire.

* * * * *

There are at all times two literatures which, although scarcely known to
each other, progress side by side--the one real, the other merely
apparent. The former grows into literature that _lasts_. Pursued by
people who live _for_ science or poetry, it goes its way earnestly and
quietly, but extremely slowly; and it produces in Europe scarcely a
dozen works in a century, which, however, are _permanent_. The other
literature is pursued by people who live _on_ science or poetry; it goes
at a gallop amid a great noise and shouting of those taking part, and
brings yearly many thousand works into the market. But after a few years
one asks, Where are they? where is their fame, which was so great
formerly? This class of literature may be distinguished as fleeting, the
other as permanent.

* * * * *

It would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to
read them; but one usually confuses the purchase of books with the
acquisition of their contents. To desire that a man should retain
everything he has ever read, is the same as wishing him to retain in his
stomach all that he has ever eaten. He has been bodily nourished on what
he has eaten, and mentally on what he has read, and through them become
what he is. As the body assimilates what is homogeneous to it, so will a
man _retain_ what _interests_ him; in other words, what coincides with
his system of thought or suits his ends. Every one has aims, but very
few have anything approaching a system of thought. This is why such
people do not take an objective interest in anything, and why they learn
nothing from what they read: they remember nothing about it.

_Repetitio est mater studiorum_. Any kind of important book should
immediately be read twice, partly because one grasps the matter in its
entirety the second time, and only really