I have tried to show you that pure literature is an art and like other arts depends primarily upon manner and only secondarily upon matter.  That the artist, who in this case is the author, uses his power to influence the reader usually through his emotions or feelings and that its effects to a notable extent, are not marred by repetition.  That on this account all good literature may be re-read over and over, and that the pleasure derived from such re-reading is a sign that a book is peculiarly adapted in some way to the reader.  Finally, that one’s private library, especially if its size be limited, may well consist of personal favorites, often re-read.

When the astronomer Kepler had reduced to simple laws the complicated motions of the planets he cried out in ecstacy:  “O God! now think I Thy thoughts after Thee!” Thus when a great writer of old time has been vouchsafed a spark of the divine fire we may think his divine thoughts after him by re-reading.  And Shakespeare tells us in that deathless speech of Portia’s, that since mercy is God’s attribute we may by exercising it become like God.  Thus, by the mere act of tuning our brains to think the thoughts that the Almighty has put into the minds of the good and the great, may it not be that our own thoughts may at the last come to be shaped in the same mould?

“Old wine, old friends, old books,” says the old adage; and of the three the last are surely the most satisfying.  The old wine may turn to vinegar; old friends may forget or forsake us; but the old book is ever the same.  What would the old man do without it?  And to you who are young I would say—­you may re-read, you first must read.  Choose worthy books to love.  As for those who know no book long enough either to love or despise it—­who skim through good and bad alike and forget page ninety-nine while reading page 100, we may simply say to them, in the words of the witty Frenchman, “What a sad old age you are preparing for yourself!”

HISTORY AND HEREDITY[8]

    [8] Read before the New England Society of St. Louis.

In one of his earlier books, Prof.  Hugo Munsterberg cites the growing love for tracing pedigrees as evidence of a dangerous American tendency toward aristocracy.  There are only two little things the matter with this—­the fact and the inference from it.  In the first place, we Americans have always been proud of our ancestry and fond of tracing it; and in the second place, this fondness is akin, not to aristocracy but to democracy.  It is not the purpose of this paper to prove this thesis in detail, so I will merely bid you note that aristocratic pedigree-tracers confine themselves to one line, or to a few lines.  Burke will tell you that one of the great-great-grandfathers of the present Lord Foozlem was the First Baron; he is silent about his great-grandfather, the tinker, and his great-grandfather, the pettifogging country lawyer.  Americans are far more apt to push their genealogical investigations in all directions, because they are prompted by a legitimate curiosity rather than by desire to prove a point, American genealogical research is biological, while that of Europe is commercial.