for the
winning, almost for the asking.

The great imaginative poets and thinkers and artists of the
mid-nineteenth century have drawn aside for us the curtain of the world
behind the veil, and he would be an ambitious man who would expect to
set the mark higher, in type of beauty or depth of feeling, than they
have placed it for us; but all must hope to do so, even if they do not
expect it; for the great themes are not exhausted or ever to be
exhausted; and the storehouse of the great thought and action of the
past is ever open to us to clothe our nakedness and enrich our poverty;
we need only ask to have.

"Ah!" said Coningsby, "I should like to be a great man."

The stranger threw at him a scrutinising glance. His countenance was
serious. He said in a voice of almost solemn melody--

"Nurture your mind with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes
heroes."[4]

All the great thoughts of the world are stored up in books, and all the
great books of the world, or nearly all, have been translated into
English. You should make it a systematic part of your life to search
these things out and, if only by a page or two, try how far they fit
your need. We do not enough realise how wide a field this is, how great
an undertaking, how completely unattainable except by carefully
husbanding our time from the start, how impossible it is in the span of
a human life to read the great books unless we strictly save the time
which so many spend on the little books. Ruskin's words on this subject,
almost harsh in their blunt common sense, bring the matter home so well
that I cannot refrain from quoting them.[5]

"Do you know, if you read this, that you cannot read that--that what you
lose today you cannot gain to-morrow? Will you go and gossip with your
housemaid, or your stable-boy, when you may talk with queens and kings;
or flatter yourselves that it is with any worthy consciousness of your
own claims to respect that you jostle with the common crowd for entrie
here, and audience there, when all the while this eternal court is open
to you, with its society wide as the world, multitudinous as its days,
the chosen, and the mighty, of every place and time? Into that you may
enter always; in that you may take fellowship and rank according to your
wish; from that, once entered into it, you can never be outcast but by
your own fault; by your aristocracy of companionship there, your own
inherent aristocracy will be assuredly teste