FILLED WITH IDEAS NEW TO YOU,

and you derive great pleasure.  Keep that book a year and read it over.  It is safe to say you will gain more benefit and reap greater enjoyment from the second perusal than from the first.  A library of books, every one of which you have read, is a mine without “walls.”  It is a merry assembly of old friends ever faithful.  Grief cannot drive them away.  Slander cannot alienate them.  They cannot have rival interests.  They cannot want anything you have got, and you can take all they have got,

AND NOT ROB THEM AT ALL.

You have a memory which is as treacherous as the most of the other attributes of human nature.  You sit down and read two hours on an interesting topic.  A friend opens the same subject to you, a day afterward, in conversation, and you fairly carry him by storm.  That is unfair, for you should say you have been “posting up”—­but it shows the value of a library.  By frequent “posting” on whatever you have read, you become a learned man, which is

A TITLE OF GREAT CREDIT AND DIGNITY

in most men’s eyes.  The men who read once and “read everything” are never called “learned.” They are called “superficial.”  It is a little unjust, for they have been just as studious as the “learned men,” but they have spread themselves out too thin.  They have not bought and kept the books they have read, and they cannot remember the vital points.  Suppose you recollect that Lord Bacon has said something very wise about riches.  That is all you can call to mind.  That carries no impression to anybody.  If you had the book in which you saw the speech, you could repeat it accurately, and the probability is that the next time you referred to it you could give

THE GIST OF THE WHOLE THOUGHT,

and, by the next attempt, the language itself.  You could say to your friend when you were talking about wealth, that you have admired that speech of Bacon where he says that he cannot call riches better than the “baggage” of virtue; that he thinks the Roman word “impedimenta” still better; that, as baggage is to an army, so is riches to virtue; it cannot be spared or left behind, but, in his quaint expression, “it hindereth the march; yea, and the care of it sometimes loseth or disturbeth the victory.”  Your friend would be gratified with so perfect a figure of speech, and he would never call you “superficial.”  That is real experience.  It is not theory.  A book has little value to a man until he has read it at least twice.  He has then labeled and pigeon-holed it, and really needs to possess it.

A MAN OUGHT TO READ