gerous thing to do if
it were not much more dangerous not to. The same forces that wrought
themselves into the books when they were being made can be trusted to
gather and play across them on the shelves. These forces are the
self-propelling and self-healing forces of the creative mood. The
creative mood protects the books, and it protects all who come near the
books. It protects from the inside. It toughens and makes supple.
Parents who cannot trust a boy to face the weather in a library should
never let him outdoors.

Trusting a boy to the weather in a library may have its momentary
embarrassments, but it is immeasurably the shortest and most natural way
to bring him into a vital connection with books. The first condition of
a vital connection with books is that he shall make the connection for
himself. The relation will be vital in proportion as he makes it
himself.

The fact that he will begin to use his five reading senses by trying to
connect in the wrong way, or by connecting with the wrong books or parts
of books, is a reason, not for action on the part of parents and
teachers, but for inspired waiting. As a vital relation to books is the
most immeasurable outfit for living and the most perfect protection
against the dangers of life, a boy can have, the one point to be borne
in mind is not the book but the boy--the instinct of curiosity in the
boy.

A boy who has all his good discoveries in books made for him--spoiled
for him, if he has any good material in him--will proceed to make bad
ones. The vices would be nearly as safe from interference as the
virtues, if they were faithfully cultivated in Sunday-schools or by
average teachers in day-schools. Sin itself is uninteresting when one
knows all about it. The interest of the average young man in many a more
important sin to-day is only kept up by the fact that no one stands by
with a book teaching him how to do it. Whatever the expression "original
sin" may have meant in the first place, it means now that we are full of
original sin because we are not given a chance to be original in
anything else. A virtue may be defined as an act so good that a
religiously trained youth cannot possibly learn anything more about it.
A classic is a pleasure hurried into a responsibility, a book read by
every man before he has anything to read it with. A classical author is
a man who, if he could look ahead--could see the generations standing in
rows to read his book, toeing