Chapter I: Front Matter

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THE BOOK-LOVER.

A Guide to the Best Reading.

BY

JAMES BALDWIN, Ph.D.,

AUTHOR OF “ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LITERARY CRITICISM”, ETC., ETC.

Whosoever acknowledges himself to be a zealous follower of truth,
of happiness, of wisdom, of science, or even of the faith, must of
necessity make himself a Lover of Books.

RICHARD DE BURY.

CHICAGO:
JANSEN, McCLURG, AND COMPANY.
1885.

Copyright,
By Jansen, McClurg, & Co.
A. D. 1884.

A Fore Word.

The titlepage of this book explains its plan and purpose. The Courses of Reading and the Schemes for Practical Study, herein indicated, are the outgrowth of the Author’s long experience as a lover of books and director of reading. They have been tested and found to be all that is claimed for them. As to the large number of quotations in the first part of the book, they are given in the belief that “in a multitude of counsels there is wisdom.” And the Author finds consolation and encouragement in the following words of Emerson: “We are as much informed of a writer’s genius by what he selects, as by what he originates. We read the quotation with his eyes, and find a new and fervent sense.” As the value of the most useful inventions depends upon the ingenious placing of their parts, so the originality of this work may be found to lie chiefly in its arrangement. Yet the writer confidently believes that his readers will enjoy that which he has borrowed, and possibly find aid and encouragement in that which he claims as his own; and therefore this book is sent out with the hope that book-lovers will find in it a safe Guide to the Best Reading.

CONTENTS.
Page

PRELUDE: IN PRAISE OF BOOKS 9

CHAPTER

I. ON THE CHOICE OF BOOKS 23

II. HOW TO READ 42

III. ON THE VALUE AND USE OF LIBRARIES 56

IV. BOOKS FOR EVERY SCHOLAR 69

V. WHAT BOOKS SHALL YOUNG FOLKS READ? 84

VI. HINTS ON THE FORMATION OF SCHOOL LIBRARIES 108

VII. COURSES OF READING IN HISTORY 113

VIII. COURSES OF READING IN GEOGRAPHY AND NATURAL HISTORY 138

IX. PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 148

X. POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE SCIENCE OF GOVERNMENT 161

XI. ON THE PRACTICAL STUDY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 168

AN AFTER WORD 196

INDEX 197

PRELUDE.

In Praise of Books.

Let us consider how great a commodity of doctrine exists in Books;
how easily, how secretly, how safely they expose the nakedness of
human ignorance without putting it to shame. These are the masters
who instruct us without rods and ferules, without hard words and
anger, without clothes or money. If you approach them, they are not
asleep; if investigating you interrogate them, they conceal nothing;
if you mistake them, they never grumble; if you are ignorant, they
cannot laugh at you.

You only, O Books, are liberal and independent. You give to all who
ask, and enfranchise all who serve you assiduously. Truly, you are
the ears filled with most palatable grains. You are golden urns
in which manna is laid up; rocks flowing with honey, or rather,
indeed, honeycombs; udders most copiously yielding the milk of life;
store-rooms ever full; the four-streamed river of Paradise, where
the human mind is fed, and the arid intellect moistened and watered;
fruitful olives; vines of Engaddi; fig-trees knowing no sterility;
burning lamps to be ever held in the hand.

The library, therefore, of wisdom is more precious than all riches;
and nothing that can be wished for is worthy to be compared with it.
Whosoever acknowledges himself to be a zealous follower of truth,
of happiness, of wisdom, of science, or even of the faith, must of
necessity make himself a Lover of Books.

RICHARD DE BURY, 1344.

Books are friends whose society is extremely agreeable to me; they
are of all ages, and of every country. They have distinguished
themselves both in the cabinet and in the field, and obtained high
honors for their knowledge of the sciences. It is easy to gain access
to them; for they are always at my service, and I admit them to my
company, and dismiss them from it, whenever I please. They are never
troublesome, but immediately answer every question I ask them. Some
relate to me the events of past ages, while others reveal to me
the secrets of Nature. Some teach me how to live, and others how to
die. Some, by their vivacity, drive away my cares and exhilarate my
spirits; while others give fortitude to my mind, and teach me the
important lesson how to restrain my desires, and to depend wholly
on myself. They open to me, in short, the various avenues of all
the arts and sciences, and upon their information I safely rely in
all emergencies. In return for all these services, they only ask me
to accommodate them with a convenient chamber in some corner of my
humble habitation, where they may repose in peace; for these friends
are more delighted by the tranquility of retirement, than with the
tumults of society.

FRANCESCO PETRARCA.

Books are the Glasse of Counsell to dress ourselves by. They are
Life’s best Business: Vocation to them hath more Emolument coming
in, than all the other busie Termes of Life. They are Feelesse
Counsellours, no delaying Patrons, of easie Accesse, and kind
Expedition, never sending away any Client or Petitioner. They are
for Company, the best Friends; in doubts, Counsellours; in Damp,
Comforters; Time’s Perspective; the home Traveller’s Ship, or Horse;
the busie Man’s best Recreation; the Opiate of idle Wearinesse; the
Mind’s best Ordinary; Nature’s Garden and Seed-plot of Immortality.

A WRITER OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
(quoted in “Allibone’s Dictionary”).

But how can I live here without my books? I really seem to myself
crippled and only half myself; for if, as the great Orator used to
say, arms are a soldier’s members, surely books are the limbs of
scholars. Corasius says: “Of a truth, he who would deprive me of
books, my old friends, would take away all the delight of my life;
nay, I will even say, all desire of living.”

BALTHASAR BONIFACIUS RHODIGINUS, 1656.

For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency
of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they
are; nay, they do preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and
extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are
as lively and as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon’s
teeth, and, being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed
men.... Many a man lives, a burden to the earth; but a good book is
the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up
on purpose for a life beyond life.

JOHN MILTON.

Books are a guide in youth, and an entertainment for age. They
support us under solitude, and keep us from being a burden to
ourselves. They help us to forget the crossness of men and things,
compose our cares and our passions, and lay our disappointments
asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the
dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their
conversation.

JEREMY COLLIER.

God be thanked for books! They are the voices of the distant and the
dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are
the true levellers. They give to all who will faithfully use them,
the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our
race. No matter how poor I am; no matter though the prosperous of my
own time will not enter my obscure dwelling; if the sacred writers
will enter and take up their abode under my roof,—if Milton will
cross my threshold to sing to me of Paradise; and Shakspeare to open
to me the worlds of imagination and the workings of the human heart;
and Franklin to enrich me with his practical wisdom,—I shall not pine
for want of intellectual companionship, and I may become a cultivated
man, though excluded from what is called the best society in the
place where I live.

WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING.

In a corner of my house I have books,—the miracle of all my
possessions, more wonderful than the wishing-cap of the Arabian
tales; for they transport me instantly, not only to all places, but
to all times. By my books I can conjure up before me to a momentary
existence many of the great and good men of past ages, and for my
individual satisfaction they seem to act again the most renowned
of their achievements; the orators declaim for me, the historians
recite, the poets sing.

DR. ARNOTT.

Wondrous, indeed, is the virtue of a true book! Not like a dead city
of stones, yearly crumbling, yearly needing repair; more like a
tilled field, but then a spiritual field; like a spiritual tree, let
me rather say, it stands from year to year and from age to age (we
have books that already number some hundred and fifty human ages);
and yearly comes its new produce of leaves (commentaries, deductions,
philosophical, political systems; or were it only sermons, pamphlets,
journalistic essays), every one of which is talismanic and
thaumaturgic, for it can persuade man. O thou who art able to write a
book, which once in two centuries or oftener there is a man gifted
to do, envy not him whom they name city-builder, and inexpressibly
pity him whom they name conqueror or city-burner! Thou, too, art a
conqueror and victor; but of the true sort, namely, over the Devil.
Thou, too, hast built what will outlast all marble and metal, and be
a wonder-bringing city of mind, a temple and seminary and prophetic
mount, whereto all kindreds of the earth will pilgrim.

THOMAS CARLYLE.

Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select,
the more enjoyable; and like these are approached with diffidence,
nor sought too familiarly nor too often, having the precedence only
when friends tire. The most mannerly of companions, accessible at all
times, in all moods, they frankly declare the author’s mind, without
giving offence. Like living friends, they too have their voice and
physiognomies, and their company is prized as old acquaintances.
We seek them in our need of counsel or of amusement, without
impertinence or apology, sure of having our claims allowed. A good
book justifies our theory of personal supremacy, keeping this fresh
in the memory and perennial. What were days without such fellowship?
We were alone in the world without it.

A. BRONSON ALCOTT.

Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company
of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all
civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the
results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid
and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by
etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom
friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers
of another age. We owe to books those general benefits which come
from high intellectual action. Thus, I think, we often owe to them
the perception of immortality. They impart sympathetic activity to
the moral power. Go with mean people, and you think life is mean.
Then read Plutarch, and the world is a proud place, peopled with men
of positive quality, with heroes and demi-gods standing around us,
who will not let us sleep. Then they address the imagination: only
poetry inspires poetry. They become the organic culture of the time.
College education is the reading of certain books which the common
sense of all scholars agrees will represent the science already
accumulated.... In the highest civilization the book is still the
highest delight.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

A great book that comes from a great thinker,—it is a ship of
thought, deep-freighted with truth, with beauty too. It sails the
ocean, driven by the winds of heaven, breaking the level sea of life
into beauty where it goes, leaving behind it a train of sparkling
loveliness, widening as the ship goes on. And what a treasure it
brings to every land, scattering the seeds of truth, justice, love,
and piety, to bless the world in ages yet to come!

THEODORE PARKER.

What is a great love of books? It is something like a personal
introduction to the great and good men of all past times. Books, it
is true, are silent as you see them on their shelves; but, silent
as they are, when I enter a library I feel as if almost the dead
were present, and I know if I put questions to these books they will
answer me with all the faithfulness and fulness which has been left
in them by the great men who have left the books with us.

JOHN BRIGHT.

I love my books as drinkers love their wine;
The more I drink, the more they seem divine;
With joy elate my soul in love runs o’er,
And each fresh draught is sweeter than before!
Books bring me friends where’er on earth I be,—
Solace of solitude, bonds of society.

I love my books! they are companions dear,
Sterling in worth, in friendship most sincere;
Here talk I with the wise in ages gone,
And with the nobly gifted in our own:
If love, joy, laughter, sorrow please my mind,
Love, joy, grief, laughter in my books I find.

FRANCIS BENNOCH.

Books are the windows through which the soul looks out.

HENRY WARD BEECHER.

Books are our household gods; and we cannot prize them too highly.
They are the only gods in all the mythologies that are beautiful
and unchangeable; for they betray no man, and love their lovers. I
confess myself an idolater of this literary religion, and am grateful
for the blessed ministry of books. It is a kind of heathenism which
needs no missionary funds, no Bible even, to abolish it; for the
Bible itself caps the peak of this new Olympus, and crowns it with
sublimity and glory. Amongst the many things we have to be thankful
for, as the result of modern discoveries, surely this of printed
books is the highest of all; and I, for one, am so sensible of its
merits that I never think of the name of Gutenberg without feelings
of veneration and homage.

JANUARY SEARLE.

The only true equalizers in the world are books; the only
treasure-house open to all comers is a library; the only wealth
which will not decay is knowledge; the only jewel which you can
carry beyond the grave is wisdom. To live in this equality, to share
in these treasures, to possess this wealth, and to secure this
jewel may be the happy lot of every one. All that is needed for the
acquisition of these inestimable treasures is the love of books.

J. A. LANGFORD.

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, and pray that we may
use it aright, and abuse it not.

JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE.

Books, we know,
Are a substantial world, both pure and good;
Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
Our pastime and our happiness will grow.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

Precious and priceless are the blessings which books scatter around
our daily paths. We walk, in imagination, with the noblest spirits,
through the most sublime and enchanting regions,—regions which, to
all that is lovely in the forms and colors of earth,

“Add the gleam,
The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration and the poet’s dream.”

A motion of the hand brings all Arcadia to sight. The war of Troy
can, at our bidding, rage in the narrowest chamber. Without stirring
from our firesides, we may roam to the most remote regions of the
earth, or soar into realms where Spenser’s shapes of unearthly beauty
flock to meet us, where Milton’s angels peal in our ears the choral
hymns of Paradise. Science, art, literature, philosophy,—all that
man has thought, all that man has done,—the experience that has
been bought with the sufferings of a hundred generations,—all are
garnered up for us in the world of books. There, among realities, in
a “substantial world,” we move with the crowned kings of thought.
There our minds have a free range, our hearts a free utterance.
Reason is confined within none of the partitions which trammel it in
life. In that world, no divinity hedges a king, no accident of rank
or fashion ennobles a dunce or shields a knave. We can select our
companions from among the most richly gifted of the sons of God; and
they are companions who will not desert us in poverty, or sickness,
or disgrace.

EDWIN P. WHIPPLE.

My latest passion shall be for books.

FRIEDRICH II. OF PRUSSIA.

For what a world of books offers itself, in all subjects, arts,
and sciences, to the sweet content and capacity of the reader? In
arithmetic, geometry, perspective, optics, astronomy, architecture,
_sculptura_, _pictura_, of which so many and such elaborate treatises
are of late written; in mechanics and their mysteries, military
matters, navigation, riding of horses, fencing, swimming, gardening,
planting, etc.... What so sure, what so pleasant? What vast tomes are
extant in law, physic, and divinity, for profit, pleasure, practice,
speculation, in verse or prose! Their names alone are the subject of
whole volumes; we have thousands of authors of all sorts, many great
libraries, full well furnished, like so many dishes of meat, served
out for several palates, and he is a very block that is affected with
none of them.

ROBERT BURTON.

Except a living man, there is nothing more wonderful than a book!—a
message to us from the dead,—from human souls whom we never saw,
who lived perhaps thousands of miles away; and yet these, on those
little sheets of paper, speak to us, amuse us, vivify us, teach
us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers. We ought to
reverence books, to look at them as useful and mighty things. If they
are good and true, ... they are the message of Christ, the maker of
all things, the teacher of all truth.

CHARLES KINGSLEY.

Golden volumes! richest treasures!
Objects of delicious pleasures!
You my eyes rejoicing please,
You my hands in rapture seize.
Brilliant wits and musing sages,
Lights who beamed through many ages,
Left to your conscious leaves their story,
And dared to trust you with their glory;
And now their hope of fame achieved,
Dear volumes!—you have not deceived.

HENRY RANTZAU.