It is as impossible, therefore, to get away from the books of power as from the stars; every new generation must make acquaintance with them, because they are as much a part of that order of things which forms the background of human life as nature itself.  With every intelligent man or woman the question is not, “Shall I take account of them?” but “How shall I get the most and the best out of them for my enrichment and guidance?”

It is with the hope of assisting some readers and students of books, and especially those who are at the beginning of the ardours, the delights, and the perplexities of the book-lover, that these chapters are undertaken.  They assume nothing on the part of the reader but a desire to know the best that has been written; they promise nothing on the part of the writer but a frank and familiar use of experience in a pursuit which makes it possible for the individual life to learn the lessons which universal life has learned, and to piece out its limited personal experience with the experience of humanity.  One who loves books, like one who loves a particular bit of a country, is always eager to make others see what he sees; that there have been other lovers of books and views before him does not put him in an apologetic mood.  There cannot be too many lovers of the best things in these pessimistic days, when to have the power of loving anything is beginning to be a great and rare gift.

The word love in this connection is significant of a very definite attitude toward books,—­an attitude not uncritical, since it is love of the best only, but an attitude which implies more intimacy and receptivity than the purely critical temper makes possible; an attitude, moreover, which expects and invites something more than instruction or entertainment,—­both valuable, wholesome, and necessary, and yet neither descriptive of the richest function which the book fulfils to the reader.  To love a book is to invite an intimacy with it which opens the way to its heart.  One of the wisest of modern readers has said that the most important characteristic of the real critic—­the man who penetrates the secret of a work of art—­is the ability to admire greatly; and there is but a short step between admiration and love.  And as if to emphasise the value of a quality so rare among critics, the same wise reader, who was also the greatest writer of modern times, says also that “where keen perception unites with good will and love, it gets at the heart of man and the world; nay, it may hope to reach the highest goal of all.”  To get at the heart of that knowledge, life, and beauty which are stored in books is surely one way of reaching the highest goal.