ad, as
they visit, for amusement, who discuss no great truths and put forth no
energy of thought on the topics which fly through their minds. With
this insensibility to the dignity of the intellect, and this frittering
away of the mind on superficial reading, I see not with what face they
can claim superiority to the laboring mass, who certainly understand
one thing thoroughly, that is, their own business, and who are doing
something useful for themselves and their fellow-creatures. The great
use of books is to rouse us to thought; to turn us to questions which
great men have been working on for ages; to furnish us with materials
for the exercise of judgment, imagination, and moral feeling; to
breathe into us a moral life from higher spirits than our own; and this
benefit of books may be enjoyed by those who have not much time for
retired study.

It must not be forgotten, by those who despair of the laboring classes
because they cannot live in libraries, that the highest sources of
truth, light, and elevation of mind, are not libraries, but our inward
and outward experience. Human life, with its joys and sorrows, its
burdens and alleviations, its crimes and virtues, its deep wants, its
solemn changes, and its retributions, always pressing on us; what a
library is this! and who may not study it? Every human being is a
volume worthy to be studied. The books which circulate most freely
through the community are those which give us pictures of human life.
How much more improving is the original, did we know how to read it?
The laborer has this page always open before him; and, still more, the
laborer is every day writing a volume more full of instruction than all
human productions,--I mean his own life. No work of the most exalted
genius can teach us so much as the revelation of human nature in the
secrets of our own souls, in the workings of our own passions, in the
operations of our own intelligence, in the retributions which follow
our own good and evil deeds, in the dissatisfaction with the present,
in the spontaneous thoughts and aspirations which form part of every
man's biography. The study of our own history from childhood, of all
the stages of our development, of the good and bad influences which
have beset us, of our mutations of feeling and purpose, and of the
great current which is setting us towards future happiness or
woe,--this is a study to make us nobly wise; and who of us has not
access to this fou