110 
WALDEN. 
petual suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain that 
the farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words 
which he has heard. Men sometimes speak as if the 
study of the classics would at length make way for more 
modern and practical studies; but the adventurous stu¬ 
dent 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 de¬ 
cayed, and there are such answers to the most modern 
inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. 
We might 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 customs of the 
day esteem. It requires a training 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 were written. It is not enough 
even to be able to speak the language of that nation by 
which they are written, for there is a memorable 
interval between the spoken and the written lan¬ 
guage, the language heard and the language read. 
The one is commonly transitory, a sound, a tongue, 
a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it un¬ 
consciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The 
other is the maturity and experience of that; if that is 
our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved 
and select expression, too significant to be heard by the 
ear, which we must be born again in order to speak. The 
crowds of men who merely spoke the Greek and Latin 
tongues in the middle ages were not entitled by the ac¬ 
cident of birth to read the works of genius written in 
