ide knowledge and
trained skill.

Knowing, then, as we do, the dangers and obstacles in the way, and
realizing the innumerable inspirations which the best thought gives to
us, can we not so direct the reading of our children that our older
boys and girls shall not be so exclusively modern in their tastes; so
that they may be inclined to take a little less Mr. Saltus, a little
more Shakespeare, temper their devotion to Mr. Kipling by small doses
of Dante, forsake "The Duchess" for a dip into Thackeray, and use
Hawthorne as a safe and agreeable antidote to Mr. Haggard? We need not
despair of the child who does not care to read, for books are not the
only means of culture; but they are a very great means when the mind
is really stimulated, and not simply padded with them.

Mr. Frederic Harrison says: "Books are no more education than laws are
virtue. Of all men, perhaps the book-lover needs most to be reminded
that man's business here is to know for the sake of living, not to
live for the sake of knowing."

But a child who has no taste for reading, who is utterly incapable of
losing himself in a printed page, quite unable to forget his childish
griefs,

"And plunge,
Soul forward, headlong into a book's profound,
Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth,"

--such a child is to be pitied as missing one of the chief joys of
life. Such a child has no dear old book-friendships to look back upon.
He has no sweet associations with certain musty covers and time-worn
pages; no sacred memories of quiet moments when a new love of
goodness, a new throb of generosity, a new sense of humanity, were
born in the ardent young soul; born when we had turned the last page
of some well-thumbed volume and pressed our tear-stained childish
cheek against the window pane, when it was growing dusk without, and a
mother's voice called us from our shelter to "Lay the book down, dear,
and come to tea." For, to speak in better words than my own, "It
is the books we read before middle life that do most to mould our
characters and influence our lives; and this not only because our
natures are then plastic and our opinions flexible, but also because,
to produce lasting impression, it is necessary to give a great author
time and meditation. The books that are with us in the leisure of
youth, that we love for a time not only with the enthusiasm, but with
something of the exclusiveness, of a first love, are those that enter
as factors for