n if the youth of the period, as a live, human, reading being (on the
principles to be laid down in the following pages), is so fortunate as to
succeed in escaping the dangers and temptations of the home--even if he
contrives to run the gauntlet of the grammar school and the academy--even
if, in the last, longest, and hardest pull of all, he succeeds in
keeping a spontaneous habit with books in spite of a college course, the
story is not over. Civilisation waits for him--all-enfolding,
all-instructing civilisation, and he stands face to face--book in
hand--with his last chance.

III

Dust to Dust

Whatever else may be said of our present civilisation, one must needs go
very far in it to see Abraham at his tent's door, waiting for angels.
And yet, from the point of view of reading and from the point of view of
the books that the world has always called worth reading, if ever there
was a type of a gentleman and scholar in history, and a Christian, and a
man of possibilities, founder and ruler of civilisations, it is this
same man Abraham at his tent's door waiting for angels. Have we any like
him now? Peradventure there shall be twenty? Peradventure there shall be
ten? Where is the man who feels that he is free to-day to sit upon his
steps and have a quiet think, unless there floats across the spirit of
his dream the sweet and reassuring sound of some one making a tremendous
din around the next corner--a band, or a new literary journal, or a
historical novel, or a special correspondent, or a new club or church or
something? Until he feels that the world is being conducted for him,
that things are tolerably not at rest, where shall one find in
civilisation, in this present moment, a man who is ready to stop and
look about him--to take a spell at last at being a reasonable,
contemplative, or even marriageable being?

The essential unmarriageableness of the modern man and the
unreadableness of his books are two facts that work very well together.

When Emerson asked Bronson Alcott "What have you done in the world, what
have you written?" the answer of Alcott, "If Pythagoras came to Concord
whom would he ask to see?" was a diagnosis of the whole nineteenth
century. It was a very short sentence, but it was a sentence to found a
college with, to build libraries out of, to make a whole modern world
read, to fill the weary and heedless heart of it--for a thousand years.

We have plenty of provision made for books in civil