its pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? We will consider
what kind of music they are like.

III

ON READING THE ANCIENT CLASSICS[32]

The student may read Homer or AEschylus in the Greek without danger of
dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that he in some measure
emulates their heroes, and consecrates morning hours to their pages.
The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother
tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we
must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing
a larger sense than common use permits out of that wisdom and valor
and generosity we have. The modern cheap and fertile press, with all
its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic
writers of antiquity. They seem as solitary, and the letter in which
they are printed as rare and curious as ever. It is worth the expense
of youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some words of an
ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the
street, to be perpetual suggestions and provocation. It is not in vain
that the farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has
heard. Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at
length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the
adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language
they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the
classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only
oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most
modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as
well omit to study Nature because she is old.

[Footnote 32: From Chapter III of "Walden."]

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble
exercise, and one that will tax the reader more than any exercise
which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as
the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life
to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as
they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak the
language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a
memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the
language heard and the language read. The one is commonly transitory,
a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it
unconsciously, like