Then
read Plutarch, and the world is a proud place, peopled with men of
positive quality, with heroes and demigods standing around us who
will not let us sleep. Then, they address the imagination; only
poetry inspires poetry. They become the organic culture of the time.
College education is the reading of certain books which the common
sense of all scholars agrees will represent the science already
accumulated. If you know that,--for instance, in geometry, if you
have read Euclid and Laplace,--your opinion has some value; if you
do not know these, you are not entitled to give any opinion on the
subject. Whenever any skeptic or bigot claims to be heard on the
questions of intellect and morals, we ask if he is familiar with the
books of Plato, where all his pert objections have once for all been
disposed of. If not, he has no right to our time. Let him go and
find himself answered there.
Meantime, the colleges, whilst they provide us with libraries,
furnish no professor of books; and, I think, no chair is so much
wanted. In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear
friends, but they are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and
leathern boxes; and though they know us, and have been waiting two,
ten, or twenty centuries for us,--some of them,--and are eager to
give us a sign, and unbosom themselves, it is the law of their limbo
that they must not speak until spoken to; and as the enchanter has
dressed them like battalions of infantry in coat and jacket of one
cut, by the thousand and ten thousand, your chance of hitting on the
right one is to be computed by the arithmetical rule of Permutation
and Combination,--not a choice out of three caskets, but out of half
a million caskets, all alike.
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