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With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike In accu a fa fa with truth we are iyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil fro robe relory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision No dust has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed That time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, present, nor future

My residence was , than a university; and though I was beyond the range of the ordinary circulating library, I had more than ever come within the influence of those books which circulate round the world, whose sentences were first written on bark, and are now merely copied fro seated, to run through the region of the spiritual world; I have had this advantage in books To be intoxicated by a single glass of wine; I have experienced this pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of the esoteric doctrines" I kept Hoh I looked at his page only now and then Incessant labor with my hands, at first, for I had my house to finish and my beans to hoe at the same time, made more study impossible Yet I sustainedin future I read one or two shallow books of travel in the intervals of my work, till that employment made me ashamed of myself, and I asked where it was then that I lived

The student er of dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that he in so hours to their pages The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our enerate ti of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than coenerosity we have The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity They seem as solitary, and the letter in which they are printed as rare and curious, as ever It is worth the expense of youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only soe, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be perpetual suggestions and provocations It is not in vain that the farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard Men soth make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the ave We ht as well omit to study Nature because she is old To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the custo such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they ritten It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a e, the language heard and the language read The one is coue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers The other is the ue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we ain in order to speak The crowds of ues in the Middle Ages were not entitled by the accident of birth to read the works of genius written in those languages; for these were not written in that Greek or Latin which they knew, but in the select language of literature They had not learned the nobler dialects of Greece and Rome, but the very materials on which they ritten aste paper to them, and they prized instead a cheap contemporary literature But when the several nations of Europe had acquired distinct though rude written languages of their own, sufficient for the purposes of their rising literatures, then first learning revived, and scholars were enabled to discern from that remoteness the treasures of antiquity What the Roman and Grecian es a few scholars read, and a few scholars only are still reading it

However much we may admire the orator&039;s occasional bursts of eloquence, the noblest written words are coe as the firmament with its stars is behind the clouds There are the stars, and they who can may read them The astronomers forever comment on and observe them They are not exhalations like our daily colloquies and vaporous breath What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and ould be distracted by the event and the crohich inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and health of e who can understand him

No wonder that Alexander carried the Iliad with him on his expeditions in a precious casket A written word is the choicest of relics It is so at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art It is the work of art nearest to life itself It e, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; -- not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself The syht becomes a modern man&039;s speech Two thousand summers have imparted to the monuments of Grecian literature, as to her olden and autumnal tint, for they have carried their own serene and celestial atainst the corrosion of time Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, s or emperors, exert an influence on mankind When the illiterate and perhaps scornful trader has earned by enterprise and industry his coveted leisure and independence, and is admitted to the circles of wealth and fashion, he turns inevitably at last to those still higher but yet inaccessible circles of intellect and genius, and is sensible only of the imperfection of his culture and the vanity and insufficiency of all his riches, and further proves his good sense by the pains which be takes to secure for his children that intellectual culture whose want he so keenly feels; and thus it is that he becomes the founder of a family

Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they ritten e of the history of the human race; for it is remarkable that no transcript of theue, unless our civilization itself arded as such a transcript Holish, nor AEschylus, nor Virgil even -- works as refined, as solidly done, and as beautiful al itself; for later writers, say ill of their genius, have rarely, if ever, equalled the elaborate beauty and finish and the lifelong and heroic literary labors of the ancients They only talk of forgetting theet theenius which will enable us to attend to and appreciate thee will be rich indeed when those relics which we call Classics, and the still older and more than classic but even less known Scriptures of the nations, shall have still further accumulated, when the Vaticans shall be filled with Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares, and all the centuries to come shall have successively deposited their trophies in the forum of the world By such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last

The works of the great poets have never yet been read by reat poets can read them They have only been read as the ically, not astronomically Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but e have to stand on tip-toe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to

I think that having learned our letters we should read the best that is in literature, and not be forever repeating our a-b-abs, and words of one syllable, in the fourth or fifth classes, sitting on the lowest and foremost form all our lives Most men are satisfied if they read or hear read, and perchance have been convicted by the wisdoood book, the Bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate their faculties in what is called easy reading There is a work in several volu," which I thought referred to a town of that name which I had not been to There are those who, like corest all sorts of this, even after the fullest dinner ofto be wasted If others are the machines to provide this provender, they are the machines to read it They read the nine thousandth tale about Zebulon and Sophronia, and how they loved as none had ever loved before, and neither did the course of their true love run set up again and go on! how soot up on to a steeple, who had better never have gone up as far as the belfry; and then, having needlessly got his the bell for all the world to coain! For my part, I think that they had betterheroes of universal noveldo the constellations, and let the round there till they are rusty, and not come down at all to bother honest s the bell I will not stir though the -house burn down "The Skip of the Tip-Toe-Hop, a Roes, by the celebrated author of `Tittle-Tol-Tan,&039; to appear in ether" All this they read with saucer eyes, and erect and priations even yet need no sharpening, just as soilt-covered edition of Cinderella -- without any improvement, that I can see, in the pronunciation, or accent, or e the nation of the vital circulations, and a general deliquiu off of all the intellectual faculties This sort of gingerbread is baked daily and more sedulously than pure wheat or rye-and-Indian in almost every oven, and finds a surer market

The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this toith a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and spell Even the college-bred and so-called liberally educated men here and elsewhere have really little or no acquaintance with the English classics; and as for the recorded wisdom of mankind, the ancient classics and Bibles, which are accessible to all ill know of them, there are the feeblest efforts anywhere made to becoe, who takes a French paper, not for news as he says, for he is above that, but to "keep hi a Canadian by birth; and when I ask hi he can do in this world, he says, beside this, to keep up and add to his English This is about as enerally do or aspire to do, and they take an English paper for the purpose One who has just colish books will find how many ho a Greek or Latin classic in the original, whose praises are familiar even to the so-called illiterate; he will find nobody at all to speak to, but must keep silence about it Indeed, there is hardly the professor in our colleges, who, if he has e, has proportionally mastered the difficulties of the wit and poetry of a Greek poet, and has any sympathy to impart to the alert and heroic reader; and as for the sacred Scriptures, or Bibles of mankind, who in this town can tell me even their titles? Most men do not know that any nation but the Hebrews have had a scripture A o considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of; -- and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers and class-books, and e leave school, the "Little Reading," and story-books, which are for boys and beginners; and our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins

I aspire to be acquainted iser men than this our Concord soil has produced, whose names are hardly known here Or shall I hear the name of Plato and never read his book? As if Plato were hbor and I never heard him speak or attended to the wisdoues, which contain as immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and yet I never read them We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my townsman who cannot read at all and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects We should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were We are a race of tit-hts than the columns of the daily paper

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would beto our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us Howof a book! The book exists for us, perchance, which will explain our s we may find somewhere uttered These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been o to his ability, by his words and his life Moreover, isdom we shall learn liberality The solitary hired man on a farm in the outskirts of Concord, who has had his second birth and peculiar religious experience, and is driven as he believes into the silent gravity and exclusiveness by his faith, o, travelled the sa wise, knew it to be universal, and treated his neighbors accordingly, and is even said to have invented and established worship a h the liberalizing influence of all the worthies, with Jesus Christ hio by the board

We boast that we belong to the Nineteenth Century and arethe most rapid strides of any nation But consider how little this village does for its own culture I do not wish to flatter my townsmen, nor to be flattered by them, for that will not advance either of us We need to be provoked -- goaded like oxen, as we are, into a trot We have a comparatively decent syste the half-starved Lyceu of a library suggested by the State, no school for ourselves We spend more on almost any article of bodily aliment or ailment than on our mental aliment It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education e begin to be es were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure -- if they are, indeed, so well off -- to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives Shall the world be confined to one Paris or one Oxford forever? Cannot students be boarded here and get a liberal education under the skies of Concord? Can we not hire so the cattle and tending the store, we are kept frolected In this country, the village should in some respects take the place of the nobleman of Europe It should be the patron of the fine arts It is rich enough It wants only the h on such things as farht Utopian to propose spending ent men know to be of far more worth This town has spent seventeen thousand dollars on a town-house, thank fortune or politics, but probably it will not spend sowit, the true meat to put into that shell, in a hundred years The one hundred and twenty-five dollars annually subscribed for a Lyceum in the winter is better spent than any other equal sum raised in the town If we live in the Nineteenth Century, why should we not enjoy the advantages which the Nineteenth Century offers? Why should our life be in any respect provincial? If ill read newspapers, why not skip the gossip of Boston and take the best newspaper in the world at once? -- not be sucking the pap of "neutral faland Let the reports of all the learned societies co Why should we leave it to Harper & Brothers and Redding & Co to select our reading? As the nobleman of cultivated taste surrounds hienius -- learning -- wit -- books -- paintings -- statuary -- music -- philosophical instrue do -- not stop short at a pedagogue, a parson, a sexton, a parish library, and three selecth a cold winter once on a bleak rock with these To act collectively is according to the spirit of our institutions; and I a, our land can hire all the wise men in the world to come and teach her, and board them round the while, and not be provincial at all That is the uncommon school ant Instead of noblees of o round a little there, and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us