library, we may look proudly at Shakespeare, and Bacon, and Bunyan, as they stand in our book-case in company with other noble spirits, and one or two of whom the world knows nothing, but whose worth we have often tested. These may cheer and enlighten us, may inspire us with higher aims and aspirations, may make us, if we use them rightly, wiser and better

men.

ANDREW LANG, B. 1844.

In torrid heats of late July,

In March, beneath the bitter bise,
He book-hunts while the loungers fly,-
He book-hunts, though December freeze;
In breeches baggy at the knees,

And heedless of the public jeers,
For these, for these, he hoards his fees,
Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs.

JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE (AMERICAN DIVINE). Let us thank God for books. When I consider what some books have done for the world, and what they are doing, how they keep up our hope, awaken new courage and faith, soothe pain, give an ideal life to those whose homes are hard and cold, bind together distant ages and foreign lands, create new worlds of beauty, bring down truths from heaven-I give eternal blessings for this gift.

AUSTIN DOBSON.

But the row that I prize is yonder,
Away on the unglazed shelves,
The bulged and the bruised octavos,
The dear and the dumpy twelves,-

Montaigne with his sheepskin blistered,
And Howell the worse for wear,
And the worm-drilled Jesuit's Horace,
And the little old cropped Molière,-
And the Burton I bought for a florin,
And the Rabelais foxed and flea'd,-
For the others I never have opened,
But those are the ones I read.

CHARLES F. RICHARDSON.

With young or old, there is no such helper towards the reading habit as the cultivation of this warm and undying feeling of the friendliness of books. If a parent, or a teacher, or a book, seems but a task-master; if their rules are those of a statute-book and their society like that of an officer of the law, there is small hope that their help can be made either serviceable or profitable. But with the growth of the friendly feeling comes a state of mind which renders all things possible. When one book has become a friend and fellow, the world has grown that much broader and more beautiful.

The great secret of reading consists in this, that it does not matter so much what we read, or how we read it, as what we think and how we think it. Reading is only the fuel; and, the mind once on fire, any and all material will feed the flame, provided only it have any combustible matter in it.

R. H. BAYNES.

If you love books immensely, and having little to spend, can but seldom afford the luxury of a new inmate of your shelves, what a treat it is to devote, with

clear conscience, some extra pound to the procuring a new delicious volume or two! The consideration as to which, out of a long list of wants, shall pass over into the list of possessions; the pleasure of the mere act of buying (the school-boy all over again); then the bringing the new treasures home; the gratification of unwrapping them, and of showing them to your wife; the calm enjoyment of cutting them open; the excitement of the re-arrangement of the shelves; the satisfied contemplation of these books when they are finally settled; also on coming down the next morning; the side glance of pleased remembrance of them for some days after!

JAMES MCCosн.

The book to read is not the one that thinks for you, but the one that makes you think.

NOAH PORTER.

No man can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.

RICHARD DEBury.

These are the masters who instruct us without rods, who cannot laugh at our ignorance.

THOMAS CARLYLE.

The true university of these days is a collection of books.

JOHN LOCKE.

Reading furnishes the mind only with material of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read

ours.

8

FENELON.

The greatest defect in common education is that we are in the habit of putting pleasure all on one side, and weariness on the other, all weariness in study, all pleasure in idleness.

MRS. R. C. WATERSTON (AN AMERICAN WRITER).

What is unseen forms the real value of a library. The type, the paper, the binding, the age, are all visible; but the soul that conceived it, the mind that arranged it, the hand that wrote it, the associations which cling to it, are the invisible links in a long chain of thought, effort, and history, which make the book what it is.

ANONYMOUS AUTHORS.

Book-love is the good angel that keeps watch by the poor man's hearth, and hallows it; saving him from the temptations that lurk beyond its charmed circle; giving him new thoughts and noble aspirations, and lifting him, as it were, from the mere mechanical drudgery of his every-day occupation. The wife blesses it, as she sits smiling and sewing, alternately listening to her husband's voice, or hushing the child upon her knee. She blesses it for keeping him near her, and making him cheerful, and manly, and kind-hearted.

We have known Book-love to be independent of the author, and lurk in a few charmed words traced upon the title-page by a once familiar hand-words of affectionate remembrance, rendered, it may be, by change and bereavement, inexpressibly dear! Flowers in books are a sweet sign, and there is a moral in their very withering. Pencil-marks in books frequently re

call scenes, and sentiments, and epochs in young lives that never come again. The faint line portrays passages that struck us years ago with their mournful beauty, and have since passed into a prophecy. Thoughts and dreams that seem like a mockery now are thus shadowed out.

There are some books which forcibly recall calm and tranquil scenes of by-gone happiness. We hear again the gentle tones of a once familiar voice long since hushed. We can remember the very passage where the reader paused a while to play the critic, or where that eloquent voice suddenly faltered, and we all laughed to find ourselves weeping, and were sorry when the tale or the poem came to an end. Books read for the first time at some particular place or period of our existence may thus become hallowed for evermore, or we love them because others loved them also in by-gone days.

A pretty allegory might be made showing how a certain Pygmalion collected together a divine library, so beautiful, so perfect, so harmonious in all its parts, that he who made it and gazed upon it was straightway smitten with a passion which made his heart to beat and his cheek to glow; and how presently the library became alive to him, a beneficent being, full of love and tender thought, as good as she was beautiful, a friend who never failed him; and how they were united in holy wedlock and lived together, and never tired of each other until he died, when the life went also out of the library, his wife, and she fell all to separate pieces, every piece a precious seedling of future life should it be planted in the right place. Is there not here the material for an allegory? A library, you will