READING* 
109 
whose sentences were first written on bark, and are now 
merely copied from time to time on to linen paper. 
Says the poet Mir Camar Uddin Mast, “ Being 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.’ 5 
I kept Homer’s Iliad on my table through the summer, 
though I looked at his page only now and then. Inces¬ 
sant 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 sustained myself by the 
prospect of such reading in 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 may read Homer or JEschylus in the 
Greek without danger of dissipation or luxuriousness, 
for it implies that he in some measure emulate their 
heroes, and consecrate morning hours to their pages. 
The heroic books, even if printed in the character of 
our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead 
to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the 
meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger 
sense than common use permits out of what wisdom 
and valor and generosity 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 some words of an ancient language, which are 
raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be per- 
