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 re- 

 sults of their learning and wisdom. 

 The men themselves were hid and 

 inaccessible, solitary, impatient of in- 

 terruption, fenced by etiquette; but 

 the thought which they did not un- 

 cover to their bosom friend is here 

 written out in transparent words to 

 us, the strangers of another age. 



Ralph Waldo Emerson 



