READING. 
117 
known liere. Or shall I hear the name of Plato and 
never read his book ? As if Plato were my townsman 
and I never saw him, — my next neighbor and I never 
heard him speak.or attended to the wisdom of his words. 
But how actually is it ? His Dialogues, which contain 
what was immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and 
yet I never read them. We are under-bred and low¬ 
lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do 
not make any very broad distinction between the illiter¬ 
ateness of my townsman who cannot read at all, and 
the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only 
what is for children and feeble intellects. We should 
be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by 
first knowing how good they were. We are a race of 
tit-men, and soar but little higher in our intellectual 
flights than the columns of the daily paper. 
It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. 
There are probably words addressed to our condition 
exactly, which, if we could really hear and under¬ 
stand, would be more salutary than the morning or 
the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect 
on the face of things for us. How many a man has 
dated a new era in his life from the reading of a 
book. The book exists for us perchance which will 
explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at 
present unutterable things we may find somewhere ut¬ 
tered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle 
and confound us have in their turn occurred to all 
the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has 
answered them, according to his ability, by his words 
and his life. Moreover, with wisdom we shall learn 
liberality. The solitary hired man on a farm in the 
outskirts of Concord, who has had his second birth and 
