eading everlastingly, if they
always have a book in their hands at every leisure moment, they will, of
necessity, become full-rounded and well-educated.

But they might just as well expect to become athletes by eating at every
opportunity. It is even more necessary to think than to read. Thinking,
contemplating what we have read, is what digestion and assimilation are
to the food.

Some of the biggest fools I know are always cramming themselves with
knowledge. But they never think. When they get a few minutes' leisure
they grab a book and go to reading. In other words, they are always
eating intellectually, but never digesting their knowledge or
assimilating it.

I know a young man who has formed such a habit of reading that he is
almost never without a book, a magazine, or a paper. He is always
reading at home, on the cars, at the railway stations, and he has
acquired a vast amount of knowledge. He has a perfect passion for
knowledge, and yet his mind seems to have been weakened by this perpetual
brain stuffing.

By every reader let Milton's words be borne in mind:

"Who reads
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
A spirit and judgment equal or superior, . . .
Uncertain and unsettled still remains,
Deep versed in books and shallow in himself,
Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys
And trifles for choice matters, worth a sponge,
As children gathering pebbles on the shore."

When Webster was a boy, books were scarce, and so precious that he never
dreamed that they were to be read only once, but thought they ought to be
committed to memory, or read and re-read until they became a part of his
very life.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning says, "We err by reading too much, and out of
proportion to what we think. I should be wiser, I am persuaded, if I had
not read half as much; should have had stronger and better exercised
faculties, and should stand higher in my own appreciation."

Those who live more quietly do not have so many distracting influences,
and consequently think more deeply and reflect more than others. They do
not read so much but they are better readers.

You should bring your mind to the reading of a book, or to the study of
any subject, as you take an ax to the grindstone; not for what you get
from the stone, but for the sharpening of the ax.

The greatest advantage of books does not always come from what we
remember of them, but from their suggestiveness, thei