never yet been read by mankind,
for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the
multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically.
Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they
have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in
trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little
or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which
lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the
while, but what we have to stand on tip-toe to read and devote our most
alert and wakeful hours to.

I think that having learned our letters we should read the best that is
in literature, and not be forever repeating our a-b-abs, and words of
one syllable, in the fourth or fifth classes, sitting on the lowest and
foremost form all our lives. Most men are satisfied if they read or hear
read, and perchance have been convicted by the wisdom of one good book,
the Bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate their
faculties in what is called easy reading. There is a work in several
volumes in our Circulating Library entitled "Little Reading," which I
thought referred to a town of that name which I had not been to. There
are those who, like cormorants and ostriches, can digest all sorts of
this, even after the fullest dinner of meats and vegetables, for they
suffer nothing to be wasted. If others are the machines to provide
this provender, they are the machines to read it. They read the nine
thousandth tale about Zebulon and Sophronia, and how they loved as none
had ever loved before, and neither did the course of their true love run
smooth--at any rate, how it did run and stumble, and get up again and
go on! how some poor unfortunate got up on to a steeple, who had better
never have gone up as far as the belfry; and then, having needlessly
got him up there, the happy novelist rings the bell for all the world to
come together and hear, O dear! how he did get down again! For my part,
I think that they had better metamorphose all such aspiring heroes of
universal noveldom into man weather-cocks, as they used to put heroes
among the constellations, and let them swing round there till they are
rusty, and not come down at all to bother honest men with their pranks.
The next time the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the
meeting-house burn down. "The Skip of the Tip-Toe-Hop, a Romance of the