or listening with distracted attention.  I know of nothing so harmful to the strength of the mind as this habit.  There is a valuable mental training in closely following a discourse that is valueless in itself.  After the reader has unreservedly surrendered himself to the influence of the book, and let his mind settle, as we say, and resume its own judgment, he is in a position to look at it objectively and to compare it with other facts of life and of literature dispassionately.  He can then compare it as to form, substance, tone, with the enduring literature that has come down to us from all the ages.  It is a phenomenon known to all of us that we may for the moment be carried away by a book which upon cool reflection we find is false in ethics and weak in construction.  We find this because we have standards outside ourselves.

I am not concerned to define here what is meant by literature.  A great mass of it has been accumulated in the progress of mankind, and, fortunately for different wants and temperaments, it is as varied as the various minds that produced it.  The main thing to be considered is that this great stream of thought is the highest achievement and the most valuable possession of mankind.  It is not only that literature is the source of inspiration to youth and the solace of age, but it is what a national language is to a nation, the highest expression of its being.  Whatever we acquire of science, of art, in discovery, in the application of natural laws in industries, is an enlargement of our horizon, and a contribution to the highest needs of man, his intellectual life.  The controversy between the claims of the practical life and the intellectual is as idle as the so-called conflict between science and religion.  And the highest and final expression of this life of man, his thought, his emotion, his feeling, his aspiration, whatever you choose to call it, is in the enduring literature he creates.  He certainly misses half his opportunity on this planet who considers only the physical or what is called the practical.  He is a man only half developed.  I can conceive no more dreary existence than that of a man who is past the period of business activity, and who cannot, for his entertainment, his happiness, draw upon the great reservoir of literature.  For what did I come into this world if I am to be like a stake planted in a fence, and not like a tree visited by all the winds of heaven and the birds of the air?

Those who concern themselves with the printed matter in books and periodicals are often in despair over the volume of it, and their actual inability to keep up with current literature.  They need not worry.  If all that appears in books, under the pressure of publishers and the ambition of experimenters in writing, were uniformly excellent, no reader would be under any more obligation to read it than he is to see every individual flower and blossoming shrub.  Specimens of the varieties would suffice.  But a vast proportion