Indeed, wherever you turn, among the pages of our Sage, you find no desert place, but always a very forest of thought, tumultuous and vibrant with fancy and suggestion, sweet and wholesome with living truth and all helpfulness.  You can form no better habit than to read a page or two of Emerson every night.

Take Emerson as an example; read books of that sort—­books that are kin to the Bible and Shakespeare.  There is no excuse for your poisoning your time with idle books or low books or transient books—­moth volumes that flutter an instant in the light and in an instant die.  For the great books are entertaining.  If you want excitement, Plutarch’s Lives furnish you thrilling-narrative fiction cannot surpass—­and undying inspiration besides.

The great novels, too, have in them all the blood and battle-ax the stoutest nerve can crave, all the incidents of love, self-sacrifice, and gentle invention the tenderest heart can need.  Yes, certainly:  Read books that come to stay—­the kind of books you would like to be as a man.

The Rubaiyat would deserve mention but for the danger of misunderstanding its message.  Rightly read Omar Khayyam’s lesson is serenity and poise and that power and happiness which come from these.  The disciple of the tent-maker is not apt to lose his bearings.  He no longer regards to-day as eternity, no longer looks at the world and the universe from himself as a center.  Reject the Persian poet’s apotheosis of wine, absorb his philosophy of calmness, and you will do your duty regardless of consequences.  And that is the chief thing, is it not?

Do your duty, have the courage of your thought, and walk off with the old fatalist’s verse soothing your soul and brain, and let the disturbed ones clamor.  The clamor will cease in time and turn to applause.  And whether it does or not is a matter of absolutely no importance if you have done right.

There is nothing which will more conserve the nervous forces of any serious-minded young man, nothing which will give him so much of that composure of mind and necessary concentration of powers, as the resolution to do his best and let it go at that, whether the world applaud, or laugh, or rage.  Be true to your deed, whatever it may have been, and if the deed was true, the end must necessarily be satisfactory.

Burns, of course, we must read.  We must have him to keep the milk of human kindness flowing in our veins—­to keep sweet and sincere and loving.  The good that you get from Burns cannot be analyzed.  You cannot say, “I have read Burns, and find in him of wisdom so many grains, of humor so many grains, of beauty of expression so many grains,” and so forth and so on to the end.

It is the general effect of Burns that is so valuable, so indispensable.  Read a little bit of Burns every day, and you will find it very hard to be unkind; you are conscious that you are more human.  A mellow and delightful sympathy for your fellow man—­aye, and for all living things—­warms your heart.  And this human quality is more valuable than all the riches of all the lords of wealth.