We get many letters from clergymen asking advice about reading, and deploring their lack of books.  I warrant they all have books enough to shake earth and heaven with, if the books were rightly used.  A man who owns a Bible has, to begin with, a library as long as from here to heaven.  The dullest preachers I know of have splendid libraries.  They own everything that has been written on a miracle, and yet when you hear them preach, if you did not get sound asleep, that would be a miracle.  They have all that Calvin and other learned men wrote about election, and while you hear them you feel that you have been elected to be bored.  They have been months and years turning over the heavy tomes on the divine attributes, trying to understand God, while some plain Christian, with a New Testament in his hand, goes into the next alley, and sees in the face of an invalid woman peace and light and comfort and joy which teach him in one hour what God is.

There are two kinds of dullness—­learned dullness and ignorant dullness.  We think the latter preferable, for it is apt to be more spicy.  You cannot measure the length of a man’s brain, nor the width of his heart, nor the extent of his usefulness by the size of his library.

Life is so short you cannot know everything.  There are but few things we need to know, but let us know them well.  People who know everything do nothing.  You cannot read all that comes out.  Every book read without digestion is so much dyspepsia.  Sixteen apple-dumplings at one meal are not healthy.

In our age, when hundreds of books are launched every day from the press, do not be ashamed to confess ignorance of the majority of the volumes printed.  If you have no artistic appreciation, spend neither your dollars nor your time on John Ruskin.  Do not say that you are fond of Shakespeare if you are not interested in him, and after a year’s study would not know Romeo from John Falstaff.  There is an amazing amount of lying about Shakespeare.

Use to the utmost what books you have, and do not waste your time in longing after a great library.  You wish you could live in the city and have access to some great collection of books.  Be not deceived.  The book of the library which you want will be out the day you want it.  I longed to live in town that I might be in proximity to great libraries.  Have lived in town thirteen years, and never found in the public library the book I asked for but once; and getting that home, I discovered it was not the one I wanted.  Besides, it is the book that you own that most profits, not that one which you take from “The Athenaeum” for a few days.

Excepting in rare cases, you might as well send to the foundling hospital and borrow a baby as to borrow a book with the idea of its being any great satisfaction.  We like a baby in our cradle, but prefer that one which belongs to the household.  We like a book, but want to feel it is ours.  We never yet got any advantage from a borrowed book.  We hope those never reaped any profit from the books they borrowed from us, but never returned.  We must have the right to turn down the leaf, and underscore the favorite passage, and write an observation in the margin in such poor chirography that no one else can read it and we ourselves are sometimes confounded.