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The Delight of Books
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Books are to mankind
what memory is be the individual. They contain the history of our
race, the discoveries we have made, the accumulated knowledge and
experience of ages; they picture for us the marvels and beauties of
nature, help us in our difficulties, comfort us in sorrow and in
suffering, change hours of weariness into moments of delight, store
our minds with ideas, fill them with good and happy thoughts, and lift
us out of and above ourselves.
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Many of those who have had, as we say, all that this world can give,
have yet told us they owed much of their purest happiness to books.
Macaulay had wealth and fame, rank and power, and yet he tells us in
his biography that he owed the happiest hours of his life to books. He
says: “If any one would make me the greatest king that ever lived,
with palaces and gardens and fine dinners, and wines and coaches, and
beautiful clothes, and hundreds of servants, on condition that I
should rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a
king who did not love reading.”
Precious and priceless are the blessings which the books scatter
around our daily paths. We walk, in imagination, with the noblest
spirits, through the most sublime and enchanting regions.
Without stirring from our firesides we may roam to the most remote
regions of the earth, or soar into realms when Spender’s shapes of
unearthly beauty flock to meet us, where Milton’s angels peal in our
ears the choral hymns of Paradise. Science, art, literature,
philosophy,---all that man has though, all that man has done,----the
experience that has been bought with the sufferings of a hundred
generations,---all are garnered up for us in the world of books.
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