And now we come to a use of books that is more important—­lies more at the root of things—­than their use for either information or recreation—­their use for inspiration.  One may get help and inspiration along with the other two—­reading about how to make a box may inspire a boy to go out and make one himself.  It is this kind of thing that should be the final outcome of every mental process.  Nothing that goes on in the brain is really complete until it ends in a motor stimulus.  The action, it is true, may not follow closely; it may be the result of years of mental adjustment; it may even take place in another body from the one where it originated.  The man who tells us how to make a box, and tells it so fascinatingly that he sets all his readers to box-making, presumably has made boxes with his own hands, but there may be those who are fitted to inspire action in others rather than to undertake it themselves.  And the larger literature of inspiration is not that which urges to specific deeds like box-making, or even to classes of deeds, like caring for the sick or improving methods of transportation; rather does it include in its scope all good thoughts and all good actions.  It makes better men and women of those who read it; it is revolutionary and evolutionary at the same time, in the best sense of both words.

What will thus inspire me, do you ask?  It would be easy to try to tell you; it would also be easy to fail.  Many have tried and failed.  This is a deeply personal matter.  I can not tell what book, or what passage in a book, will touch the magic spring that shall make your life useful instead of useless, that shall start your thoughts and your deeds climbing up instead of grovelling or passively waiting.  Only search will reveal it.  The diamond-miner who expects to be directed to the precise spot where he will find a gem will never pick one up.  Only he who seeks, finds.  There are, however, places to look and places to avoid.  The peculiar clay in which diamonds occur is well known to mineralogists.  He who runs across it, looks for diamonds, though he may find none.  But he who hunts for them on the rock-ribbed hills of New Hampshire or the sea-sands of Florida is doing a foolish thing—­although even there he may conceivably pick up one that has been dropped by accident.

So you may know where it is best to go in your search for inspiration from books, for we know where seekers in the past have most often found it.  He who could read the Bible or Shakespeare without finding some of it is the exception.  It may be looked for in the great poets—­Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Milton, Hugo, Keats, Goethe; or the great historians—­Tacitus, Herodotus, Froissart, Macaulay, Taine, Bancroft; or in the great travellers from Sir John Mandeville down, or in biographies like Boswell’s life of Johnson, or in books of science—­Laplace, Lagrange, Darwin, Tyndall, Helmholtz; in the lives of the great artists; in the great novels and romances—­Thackeray, Balzac, Hawthorne, Dickens, George Eliot.  Yet each and all of these may leave you cold and may pick up your gem in some out-of-the-way corner where neither you nor anyone else would think of looking for it.