But it is not less true that there are books which are of that
importance in a man's private experience, as to verify for him the
fables of Cornelius Agrippa, of Michael Scott, or of the old Orpheus
of Thrace; books which take rank in our life with parents and lovers
and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so
revolutionary, so authoritative; books which are the work and the
proof of faculties so comprehensive, so nearly equal to the world
which they paint, that, though one shuts them with meaner ones, he
feels his exclusion from them to accuse his way of living.
Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of
the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil
countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results
of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and
inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by
etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom
friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers
of another age.
We owe to books those general benefits which come from high
intellectual action. Thus, I think, we often owe to them the
perception of immortality. They impart sympathetic activity to the
moral power. Go with mean people, and you think life is mean.
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