Chapter XV: Appendix

Where a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and
courageous feelings, seek for no other rule to judge the event by: it
is good and made by a good workman.—DE LA BRUYÈRE.

* * * * *

You despise books: you whose whole lives are absorbed in the vanities
of ambition, the pursuit of pleasure, or in indolence; but remember
that all the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed
by books.—VOLTAIRE.

* * * * *

Within their silent chambers treasures lie
Preserved from age to age; more precious far
Than that accumulated store of gold
And orient gems, which for a day of need
The Sultan hides deep in ancestral tombs;
These hoards of truth you can unlock at will.
WORDSWORTH.

* * * * *

I not only commend the study of this literature (the eastern), but
wish our sources of supply and comparison vastly enlarged. American
students may well derive from all former lands—all the older
literatures and all the newer ones—bearing ourselves always courteous,
always deferential, indebted beyond measure to the motherworld, to all
its nations dead, as all its nations living.

WALT WHITMAN.

* * * * *

In books lies the _soul_ of the whole Past Time—the articulate,
audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it
has altogether vanished like a dream. No magic _Rune_ is stranger than
a book. All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been, is lying
in magic preservation in the pages of books. Do not books still
accomplish _miracles_ as _Runes_ were fabled to do? They persuade
men.—CARLYLE.