stands there book in hand before the shelf.  A word, a phrase, may sear into his brain—­may turn the current of his whole life.  And even if no such epoch-making words meet his eye, in how brief a time may he read, digest, appreciate, some of the gems of literature!  Leigh Hunt’s “Jennie kissed me” would probably take about thirty seconds; on a second reading he would have it by heart—­the joy of a life-time.  How many meaty epigrams would take as long?  The whole of Gray’s “Elegy” is hardly beyond the browser’s limit.

In an editorial on the Harvard Classics in the “Chicago evening post”, (April 22), we read, “the cultural tabloid has very little virtue;... to gain everything that a book has to give one must be submerged in it, saturated and absorbed”.  This is very much like saying, “there is very little nourishment in a sandwich; to get the full effect of a luncheon you must eat everything on the table”.  It is a truism to say that you can not get everything in a book without reading all of it; but it by no means follows that the virtue of less than the whole is negligible.

So much for the direct effect of what one may thus take in, bit by bit.  The indirect effect is even more important.  For by sampling a whole literature, as he does, he not only gets a bird’s-eye view of it, but he finds out what lie likes and what he dislikes; he begins to form his taste.  Are you afraid that he will form it wrong?  I am not.  We are assuming that the library where he browses is a good one; here is no chance of evil, only a choice between different kinds of good.  And even if the evil be there, it is astonishing how the healthy mind will let it slip and fasten eagerly on the good.  Would you prefer a taste fixed by someone who tells the browser what he ought to like?  Then that is not the reader’s own taste at all, but that of his informant.  We have too much of this sort of thing—­too many readers without an atom of taste of their own who will say, for instance, that they adore George Meredith, because some one has told them that all intellectual persons do so.  The man who frankly loves George Ade and can yet see nothing in Shakespeare may one day discover Shakespeare.  The man who reads Shakespeare merely because he thinks he ought to is hopeless.

But what a triumph, to stand spell-bound by the art of a writer whose name you never heard, and then discover that he is one of the great ones of the world!  Nought is comparable to it except perhaps to pick out all by yourself in the exhibition the one picture that the experts have chosen for the museum or to be able to say you liked olives the first time you tasted them.

Who are your favorites?  Did some one guide you to them or did you find them yourselves?  I will warrant that in many cases you discovered them and that this is why you love them.  I discovered DeQuincey’s romances, Praed’s poetry, Beranger in French, Heine in German, “The Arabian nights”, Moliere, Irving’s “Alhambra,” hundreds of others probably.  I am sure that I love them all far more than if some one had told me they were good books.  If I had been obliged to read them in school and pass an examination on them, I should have hated them.  The teacher who can write an examination paper on Gray’s “Elegy”, would, I firmly believe, cut up his grandmother alive before the physiology class.