tell you what it is-to tame you. So good-bye for the present." "Good-bye," she said. "But wild birds are not so easily tamed."

Then she waved her hand over her head, and went on her way singing.Blackwood's Magazine.

THE cities and parishes which have taken advantage of the Public Libraries Act seem to me to have been wise in their generation. They have understood the civilizing and refining power of literature. They have seen in it the antidote, or one of the antidotes, against what is mean and materialistic in modern life. It is related by the historian Diodorus Siculus that over the doors of the great Egyptian Library of Osymandyas-the king who gave his name, as you may remember, to Shelley's sonnet -were inscribed the Greek words vxns ἰατρεῖον, which mean the sanatorium of the soul." For the soul may be valetudinarian like the body; and, like the body, it has need of a bracing discipline. You can never cure any human ill by preaching against it; you must supplant it by some wholesome vital influence. The "expulsive power of a new affection," as Cardinal Newman has called it in one of his sermons, is the only means of driving out old affections. No doubt he was thinking of religion, and he meant that one religious faith can be eradicated only by another; it is proof against mere denial. But one taste or habit also yields only to another; it is not destroyed but supplanted. And if you would draw men away from the public-house, or the "bucket-shop," and from such associations as are congenial to these places, you must awaken in them higher tastes and aspirations, and of these the love of reading is the chief. May I commend to you a passage taken from a book which is not so popular nowadays as it was once, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy? You know he treats first of the causes of melancholy among men, and then of its cure: he says, "So sweet is the delight of study the more learning

* An address delivered on January 4th at the opening of the Kilburn Public Library.

they have (as he that hath a dropsy, the more he drinks the thirstier he is) the more they covet to learn, and the last day is prioris discipulus," and then he relates the following story, which is worth remembering, "Heinsius, the keeper of the library at Leyden in Holland, was mewed up in it all the year long; and that, which to my thinking would have bred a loathing, caused in him a greater liking. I no sooner (saith he) come into the library, but I bolt the door to me, excluding lust, ambition, avarice, and all such vices, whose name is idleness, the mother of ignorauce and melancholy herself, and in the very lap of eternity, among so many divine souls, I take my seat with so lofty a spirit and sweet content that I pity all our great ones and rich ones that know not this happiness.'

It would be unsafe, perhaps, to predict that many who hear me will use this library in the spirit of Heinsius. But the love of books is one of the greatest blessings in life. Only you cannot love a book all at once; with books, as with men and women, love is the privilege of long intimacy. It is only when books have been read and reread, and, as it were, clasped to the heart, that they become in Macaulay's words, "the old friends who are never seen with new faces; who are the same in wealth and in poverty, in glory and in obscurity." To know even one book in this way is to gain a spiritual revelation. It is thus that the study of the Bible, even as literature, has so profoundly affected English life and thought; for it often seems to me that the most sharply drawn of all dividing lines in English history is between reading and non-reading England, or, in other words, between England without the Bible and England with it. Our forefathers were contented with one book; we are sometimes not contented with

many. Gibbon says, in his autobiography, that he would not "exchange his early and invincible love of reading for the treasures of India.' But modern education has so far equalized the social classes of the community that the pleas ure of reading, which at the beginning of this century was enjoyed by a small cultivated minority, has already become, or is fast becoming, the boon of all. Did it ever occur to you to realize what a change the universality of reading and writing, which has only come to be true since the Education Act of 1870, has made in the English-speaking world? It is not the only change which distinguishes the nineteenth century from all the preceding centuries; for I suppose (to take one example) there is no reflection more curious than that the means of locomotion should have remained practically the same from the time of the Pharaohs until the reign of King George the Fourth, and then should have been revolutionized in a day. But fifty years ago a girl who left her village in the country for domestic service was cut off from her home, her family, and all the associations of her past life; she could not write to her parents, nor they to her; and if they did write, or get somebody to write for them, it was impossible for her to read their letter; she might be ill, she might be ruined, she might be dead, and the probability was that nobody who felt a natural interest in her story would know anything about her. How different it all is now, when, by the gentle arts of reading and writing, and especially of photography, that beneficent means of keeping the memory of our absent friends and children alive within our hearts, there is not an incident of her life, wherever she may be, but it is familiarly known to all the members of her family! Dreary indeed was the old age of the poor fifty years ago, without books, without newspapers, without any broadening interests. But to-day, even where the parents cannot read, their children are their interpreters of human things, and whatever pain the parents may feel, as is not unnatural, in the consciousness of their own inferiority, is more than compensated by their honest pride in their children's culture.

You, ladies and gentlemen, to whom this library will offer in future the resources of its many thousand volumes will all be readers; and I do not see how I can better utilize the few minutes in which I have the honor of addressing you than by trying to give you such advice as will help you to read wisely. For most of those who employ this library will not be students; they will not have unlimited time for reading books; it is, perhaps, only for a brief hour, when the toil of the day is done, that they will think of getting literary information. Sydney Smith said once : "Live always in the best company when you read. read. No one in youth thinks on the value of time. Do you ever reflect how you pass your life? If you live to seventy-two, which I hope you may, your life is spent in the following manner: An hour a day is three years; this makes twenty-seven years sleeping, nine years dressing, nine years at table, six years playing with children, nine years walking, drawing, and visiting, six years shopping and three years quarrelling."

It may be permitted me to hope that you will not spend your life-at least, the ladies will not-altogether in this way, partly because you will enjoy the benefits, moral as well as intellectual, of this library. Yet, however economical of your time you may be, it will be a practical difficulty for you or for any one in the present day to cope with the vast and ever-increasing mass of literature. It is perhaps three thousand years since the invention or use of writing, and during that time the writers of many nations and many ages have been pouring out books, until the stream of literature has swollen into a cataracta very Niagara of books-which sweeps, or threatens to sweep, away the delights of civilization before it. The reader of to-day aspires to know something of the thoughts which the wisest of men in all the periods of history have expressed upon the most vital subjects of human interest. He cannot, therefore, acquiesce in narrow reading. He must read widely, not in English only, but in many languages, or in translations from them. He must cultivate a cosmopolitan literary spirit. But life is short; and alas! art is long, and is becoming longer; the number of books

which a busy man can read in a year can hardly at the most exceed fifty; and, considering what a strain is now put on the most absorbing literary appetite, I am at a loss to see how any man who lives at the end of the twentieth century will deserve to be called educated at all. For books do not be come shorter as they become more numerous, it rather seems that they increase in bulk and volume; for Gibbon wrote the history of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a period of fifteen hundred years, in eight octavo volumes, and a living historian occupies the same number of volumes with the history of less than thirty years in England alone.

In these circumstances, looking to the accumulating mass of ancient literature, and the ever-accumulating mass of literature which is new, busy men have hit upon various methods of arriving by a kind of short-cut at literary knowledge. One method has been to choose an arbitrary number of the best books, and to concentrate attention upon them. Sir John Lubbock is, I think, responsible for the original list of The Hundred Books which are most widely approved, and he, if any one, is competent to make the selection; but the number has been found too large, or it has not been always accepted, and so it has been reduced by various authorities until it has come to be supposed that there is no difficulty in determining a number, however small, of the best books in the world, and I remember that a lady wrote to me not long ago asking me to name the three best books, exclusive of the Bible. Then, again, it has been thought possible to acquire an insight into literature by selections or extracts from famous books, or by abridgments of them. It sometimes happens that a person reads a review of a book and imagines he has done as much as if he had read the book itself. But upon the whole I would venture to give you a serious warning against all extracts and abridgments, whatever they may be. The author of a book has a right to demand that, if it is read, it should be read as he wrote it; it is not the same book when it is cut up or boiled down. And as to reviews, they are not the book at all; they are no

more the book than a man's clothes are the man himself; and, if you have ever written a book and seen it reviewed, it is only too likely that you have experienced a sense of astonishment at observing that, though you may not have possessed a complete knowledge of the subject with which it deals, yet at least you knew more than the reviewer.

There is an Art of Reading, I think, as well as an Art of Writing. It is not enough that people should be told to read; they must be told how they ought to read, and what. For in all life it is not the work which men bave to do that makes the difference, it is the way in which they do it. A man may do little or nothing and be always at work, or he may administer an empire and be at leisure. Let me suppose, then, that you have an hour a day, and no more, to expend upon literature.

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There are two perfectly different ways of reading a book. It is curious that we often speak of reading as if it were always the same thing. But nobody, after consideration, will maintain that it is possible or necessary to read The Proverbs of Solomon and King Solomon's Mines in the same way. Bacon, in his Essay upon Studies, puts the matter clearly : Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention." It is fair to say that there will be a great saving of time, if the number of books which require to be "chewed and digested" is made as small as possible.

I do not deny that the habit of concentrating the full power of the mind upon every chapter and page of a book is a discipline of very high value. The study of books written in a foreign language, whether ancient or modern, forms this habit, and is principally valuable as forming it. In fact, it may be doubted if a person ever reads his own language in such a way as to appreciate its full meaning. But the great majority of books in a public library do not require and do not deserve to be so read. In looking at some statistics of the books taken out of one of the public libraries by the working classes, I

By the sun's benignant beams of light and heat the earth rejoices to-day as it has ever done since, by the divine fiat, it became the centre of our system. The world's unwithered countenance is bright as at creation's day. The sun is always the joy-inspiring element in nature the source of the rainbow colors on the dark cloud. And no man has more beautifully described the sun than did the poet king of Israel in those oftadmired words: "The sun, which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race. His going forth is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it; and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof."

This suggests sunrise. The powerful king of day rejoices as he steps upon the earth over the dewy mountain tops, bathing all in light, and spreading gladness and deep joy before him. The lessening cloud, the kindling azure, and the mountain's brow, illumined with golden streaks, mark his approach; he is encompassed with bright beams as he throws his unutterable love upon the clouds, "the beauteous robes of heaven." Soon he touches the green leaves all-a-tremble with gold light. Aslant the dew-bright earth and colored air he looks in boundless majesty abroad, lightening the rocks, and hills, and streams that gleam from afar. From universal gloom-horribly pictured by Byron in "Darkness"-he clothes all in bright beauty, proving himself to be "of all material beings first and best." Yet the material glory is infinitely intensi

fied when it is clothed in light by the imagination, and irradiated by the poetic spirit. Over Christopher North's soul a gorgeous sunrise had ever an enchanting spell. And to the poetic mind of the philosophic genius, Professor Ferrier, the changing colors of sunrise suggested a very apt illustration of the dark theory of the "Becoming," as laid down in mere skeleton form by the dawn steals gradually over the earth The Greek philosopher, Heraclitus. and sky; and never at any moment can we say that the degree of light and color is definite and fixed. It is continually changing. It is continually becoming stronger and stronger; and yet at no instant can we say, or think, here one degree of clearness or color ends, and here a higher degree of clearness or color begins. In truth, none of the changes have either any end or any beginning, so imperceptibly are they run away into each other. The reason tells the eye that, even for the shortest time that can be named or conceived, the observer never sees any abiding color, any color which truly is. Within the millionth part of a second the varied glory of the eastern heavens has undergone an incalculable series of mutations. The eye seems to arrest the fleeting pageant, and to give it some continuance; but the reason says it is only a series of fleeting colors, no one of which is. As the circle is traced by a pencil moving continuously in a straight line and out of it at the same time, or as the acceleration of a falling stone is produced by the velocity being fixed and increasing at the same instant, so the gorgeous lights and colors of sunrise proceed from a blending of fixity and non-fixity. They illustrate the philosophy of the Becoming instead of the Being.

But glorious, and educating, and inspiring as is the sunrise in itself in many cases, there is occasionally something very remarkable that is connected with it. Rare is it, but how charming when witnessed, though till very recently it was all but unexplained. This is the