XVI INTRODUCTION.

are made of and how they move. If you were to tell the red man that books lay bare
the secrets of the human heart, arm it with courage in adversity, hope in the ambush of
despair, and faith that looks through death and sees beyond a city which hath founda-
tions whose builder and maker is God, and that through them-we can have even here
the earnest and foretaste of eternal peace and blessedness, his stolid indifference would
express itself in the grin of disbelief and denial. One must have something within him
to which books can speak, or they are of little worth. What they teach and do for us is
the measure of our capacity, the gauge of our development.

Emerson says, ‘‘If we encounter a man of rare intellect we should ask him what
books he read.’’ The unread man is astranger to himself and to the world in which
he lives, ‘‘not half its riches known and yet despised.’’ ‘‘He hath never fed of the
dainties that are bred in a book; he hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk
ink; his intellect is not replenished; he is only an animal, only sensible in the duller

pare 1s
“Sure, He that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and God-like reason
To fust in us unus’d.””

The child finds the mastery of the alphabet a mountain-steep, and shrinks from climb-
ing; but as stage after stage of the hard ascent is gained and higher levels are reached,
what delights flow in through the eye to the memory, to fancy, the imagination and the ~
heart. The pain of the toil is forgotten; the mechanical becomes spiritual, the sense of
drudgery ceases ; and although immeasurable heights still lift themselves before him at
every stage, the adventurous and industrious youth may behold fairer landscapes, a
widening horizon and brighter stars, to reward him for his labor. ‘‘And all the secret of
the Spring moves in the chambers of the blood.’’ The patient toil of the young man is
rewarded by broader outlooks from higher slopes; not only has he achieved mental
health and vigor, clearer vision, the keen pleasure that comes from the sense of awak-
ened faculties and creative power, but—

‘Many an old philosophy
On Argive heights divinely sang,

And round him all the thicket rang
To many a flute of Arcady.”

I happened once in New Orleans to see, through the eyes of a friend, a boy lying
prone upon a gallery not far off, his head resting upon one hand, in the other hand a
book. A fierce thunder storm was raging, the rain fell in torrents, the vivid flashes of
lightning and deafening roar of the thunder were almost continuous, but the boy heard
and heeded not; he was in another world, whose enthralling interest and beauty made
him blind and deaf to the terrors of the tempest. Withdrawn from the world around