148 EARLY SPRING IN MASSACHUSETTS. 
Spent the day in Cambridge Library. .... 
What a wilderness of books it is. Looking over 
books on Canada written within the last three 
hundred years, I could see how one had been 
built on another, each author consulting and re¬ 
ferring to his predecessors. You could read 
most of them without changing your position 
on the steps. It is necessary to find out ex¬ 
actly what books to read on a given subject. 
Though there may be a thousand books written 
upon it, it is only necessary to read three or 
four. They will contain all that is essential, 
and a few pages will show which they are. 
Books which are books are all that you want, 
and there are but half a dozen in any thousand. 
I saw that while we are clearing the forest in 
our westward progress, we are accumulating a 
forest of books in our rear, as wild and unex¬ 
plored as any of nature’s primitive wildernesses. 
The volumes of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and sev¬ 
enteenth centuries which lie so near on the 
shelf, are rarely opened, are effectually forgot¬ 
ten, and not implied by our literature and 
newspapers/ When I looked into one of them, 
it affected me like looking into an inaccessible 
swamp, ten feet deep with sphagnum, where 
the monarchs of the forest covered with mosses 
and stretched along the ground were making 
haste to become peat. Those old books sug- 
