s to protect them
against the corrosion of time. Books are the treasured wealth of the
world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the
oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of
every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they
enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse
them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in
every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on
mankind. When the illiterate and perhaps scornful trader has earned by
enterprise and industry his coveted leisure and independence, and is
admitted to the circles of wealth and fashion, he turns inevitably at
last to those still higher but yet inaccessible circles of intellect and
genius, and is sensible only of the imperfection of his culture and the
vanity and insufficiency of all his riches, and further proves his
good sense by the pains which he takes to secure for his children that
intellectual culture whose want he so keenly feels; and thus it is that
he becomes the founder of a family.

Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language
in which they were written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the
history of the human race; for it is remarkable that no transcript of
them has ever been made into any modern tongue, unless our civilization
itself may be regarded as such a transcript. Homer has never yet been
printed in English, nor AEschylus, nor Virgil even--works as refined, as
solidly done, and as beautiful almost as the morning itself; for
later writers, say what we will of their genius, have rarely, if ever,
equalled the elaborate beauty and finish and the lifelong and heroic
literary labors of the ancients. They only talk of forgetting them who
never knew them. It will be soon enough to forget them when we have the
learning and the genius which will enable us to attend to and appreciate
them. That age will be rich indeed when those relics which we call
Classics, and the still older and more than classic but even less known
Scriptures of the nations, shall have still further accumulated, when
the Vaticans shall be filled with Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, with
Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares, and all the centuries to come shall
have successively deposited their trophies in the forum of the world. By
such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last.

The works of the great poets have