It is not wealth of time, but what Mr. Gladstone has aptly called “thrift of time,” which brings ripeness of mind within reach of the great mass of men and women.  The man who has learned the value of five minutes has gone a long way toward making himself a master of life and its arts.  “The thrift of time,” says the English statesman, “will repay in after life with a usury of profit beyond your most sanguine dreams, and waste of it will make you dwindle alike in intellectual and moral stature beyond your darkest reckoning.”  And Matthew Arnold has put the same truth into words which touch the subject in hand still more closely:  “The plea that this or that man has no time for culture will vanish as soon as we desire culture so much that we begin to examine seriously into our present use of time.”  It is no exaggeration to say that the mass of men give to unplanned and desultory reading of books and newspapers an amount of time which, if intelligently and thoughtfully given to the best books, would secure, in the long run, the best fruits of culture.

There is no magic about this process of enriching one’s self by absorbing the best books; it is simply a matter of sound habits patiently formed and persistently kept up.  Making the most of one’s time is the first of these habits; utilising the spare hours, the unemployed minutes, no less than those longer periods which the more fortunate enjoy.  To “take time by the forelock” in this way, however, one must have his book at hand when the precious minute arrives.  There must be no fumbling for the right volume; no waste of time because one is uncertain what to take up next.  The waste of opportunity which leaves so many people intellectually barren who ought to be intellectually rich, is due to neglect to decide in advance what direction one’s reading shall take, and neglect to keep the book of the moment close at hand.  The biographer of Lucy Larcom tells us that the aspiring girl pinned all manner of selections of prose and verse which she wished to learn at the sides of the window beside which her loom was placed; and in this way, in the intervals of work, she familiarised herself with a great deal of good literature.  A certain man, now widely known, spent his boyhood on a farm, and largely educated himself.  He learned the rudiments of Latin in the evening, and carried on his study during working hours by pinning ten lines from Virgil on his plough,—­a method of refreshment much superior to that which Homer furnished the ploughman in the well-known passage in the description of the shield.  These are extreme cases, but they are capital illustrations of the immense power of enrichment which is inherent in fragments of time pieced together by intelligent purpose and persistent habit.