READING. 
113 
classics in the language in which they were written 
must have a very imperfect knowledge of the history 
of the human race; for it is remarkable that no tran¬ 
script of them has ever been made into any modem 
tongue, unless our civilization itself may be regarded as 
such a transcript. Homer has never yet been printed 
in English, nor iEschylus, nor Yirgil even, — works as 
refined, as solidly done, and as beautiful almost as the 
morning itself; for later writers, say what we will of 
their genius, have rarely, if ever, equalled the elaborate 
beauty and finish and the lifelong and heroic literary 
labors of the ancients. They only talk of forgetting 
them who never knew them. It will be soon enough 
to forget them when we have the learning and the 
genius which will enable us to attend to and appreciate 
them. That age will be rich indeed when those relics 
which we call Classics, and the still older and more than 
classic but even less known Scriptures of the nations, 
shall have still further accumulated, when the Yaticans 
shall be filled with Yedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, 
with Homers and Dantes and Shakspeares, and all the 
centuries to come shall have successively deposited their 
trophies in the forum of the world. By such a pile we 
may hope to scale heaven at last. 
The works of the great poets have never yet been 
read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. 
They have only been read as the multitude read the 
stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically. Most 
men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, 
as they have learned to cipher in order to keep ac¬ 
counts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as 
a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing) 
yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which 
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