All our arts aim to win this vantage.  We cannot bring the heavenly powers to us, but, if we will only choose our jobs in directions in which they travel, they will undertake them with the greatest pleasure.  It is a peremptory rule with them, that they never go out of their road.  We are dapper little busybodies, and run this way and that way superserviceably; but they swerve never from their foreordained paths,—­neither the sun, nor the moon, nor a bubble of air, nor a mote of dust.

And as our handiworks borrow the elements, so all our social and political action leans on principles.  To accomplish anything excellent, the will must work for catholic and universal ends.  A puny creature walled in on every side, as Daniel wrote,—­

  “Unless above himself he can,
  Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!”

but when his will leans on a principle, when, he is the vehicle of ideas, he borrows their omnipotence.  Gibraltar may be strong, but ideas are impregnable, and bestow on the hero their invincibility.  “It was a great instruction,” said a saint in Cromwell’s war, “that the best courages are but beams of the Almighty.”  Hitch your wagon to a star.  Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone.  Let us not lie and steal.  No god will help.  We shall find all their teams going the other way.  Charles’s Wain, Great Bear, Orion, Leo, Hercules:  every god will leave us.  Work rather for those interests which the divinities honor and promote,—­justice, love, freedom, knowledge, utility.

* * * * *

=_202._= RULES FOR READING.

Be sure, then, to read no mean books.  Shun the spawn of the press on the gossip of the hour.  Do not read what you shall learn without asking, in the street and the train.  Dr. Johnson said, “he always went into stately shops;” and good travelers stop at the best hotels; for, though they cost more, they do not cost much more, and there is the good company and the best information.  In like manner, the scholar knows that the famed books contain, first and last, the best thoughts and facts.  Now and then, by rarest luck, in some foolish grub street is the gem we want.  But in the best circles is the best information.  If you should transfer the amount of your reading day by day from the newspaper to the standard authors.—­But who dare speak of such a thing.

The three practical rules, then, which I have to offer, are:  1st.  Never read any book that is not a year old. 2d.  Never read any but famed books. 3d.  Never read any but what you like; or, in Shakespeare’s phrase,

  “No profit goes where is no pleasure ta’en: 
  In brief, sir, study what you most affect.”

Montaigne says, “Books are a languid pleasure;” but I find certain books vital and spermatic, not leaving the reader what he was:  he shuts the book a richer man.  I would never willingly read any others than such.