ch his share
of sunshine and earth has permitted him to seize. He would fain set it
down forever; engrave it on rock, if he could; saying, "This is the
best of me; for the rest, I ate, and drank, and slept, loved, and
hated, like another; my life was as the vapor and is not; but this I
saw and knew: this if anything of mine, is worth your memory." That is
his "writing"; it is, in his small human way and with whatever degree
of true inspiration is in him his inscription, or scripture. That is a
"Book."

10. Perhaps you think no books were ever so written. But, again, I
ask you, do you at all believe in honesty, or at all in kindness? or do
you think there is never any honesty or benevolence in wise people?
None of us, I hope, are so unhappy as to think that. Well, whatever
bit of a wise man's work is honestly and benevolently done, that bit is
his book, or his piece of art.[2] It is mixed always with evil
fragments--ill-done, redundant, affected work. But if you read
rightly, you will easily discover the true bits, and those _are_ the
book.

11. Now books of this kind have been written in all ages by their
greatest men:--by great readers, great statesmen, and great thinkers.
These are all at your choice; and Life is short. You have heard as
much before;--yet have you measured and mapped out this short life and
its possibilities? Do you know, if you read this, that you cannot read
that--that what you lose to-day 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
hungry and common crowd for _entree_ 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 tested, and the motives with which you strive to take
high place in the society of the living, measured, as to all the truth
and sincerity that are in them, by the place you desire to take in this
company of the Dead.

12. "The place you desire," and the pl