shelves, however scantily furnished they may be, three or four of those books to which it is well to give ten minutes every morning, before going down into the battle and choking dust of the day. Men will name these books for themselves. One will choose the Bible, another Goethe, one the "Imitation of Christ," another Wordsworth. Perhaps it matters little what it be so long as your writer has cheerful seriousness, elevation, and, above all, a sense of size and strength, which shall open out the day before you and bestow gifts of forti-10 tude and mastery. Then, to turn to the intellectual side. You know as well as I, or any one can tell you, that knowledge is worth little until you have made it so perfectly your own as to be capable of reproducing it in precise and 15 definite form. Goethe said that in the end we only retain of our studies, after all, what we practically employ of them. And it is at least well that in our serious studies we should have the possibility of practically turning them to a definite destination clearly before 20 our eyes. Nobody can be sure that he has got clear ideas on a subject unless he has tried to put them down on a piece of paper in independent words of his own. It is an excellent plan, too, when you have read a good book, to sit down and write a short abstract of what 25 you can remember of it. It is a still better plan, if you can make up your mind to a slight extra labor, to do what Lord Strafford and Gibbon and Daniel Webster did. After glancing over the title, subject, or design of a book, these eminent men would take a pen and write 30 roughly what questions they expected to find answered in it, what difficulties solved, what kind of information imparted. Such practices keep us from reading with the eye only, gliding vaguely over the page; they help 5 us to place our new acquisitions in relation with what we knew before. It is almost always worth while to read a thing twice over, to make sure that nothing has been missed or dropped on the way, or wrongly conceived or interpreted. And if the subject be serious, it 5 is often well to let an interval elapse. Ideas, relations, statements of fact, are not to be taken by storm. We have to steep them in the mind, in the hope of thus extracting their inmost essence and significance. If one lets an interval pass, and then returns, it is surprising 10 how clear and ripe that has become which, when we left it, seemed crude, obscure, full of perplexity. All this takes trouble, no doubt, but then it will not do to deal with ideas that we find in books or elsewhere as a certain bird does with its eggs-leave them in the 15 sand for the sun to hatch and chance to rear. People who follow this plan possess nothing better than ideas half hatched, and convictions reared by accident. They are like a man who should pace up and down the world in the delusion that he is clad in sumptuous robes of purple and velvet, when in truth he is only half covered by the rags and tatters of other people's cast-off clothes. Apart from such mechanical devices as those I have mentioned, there are habits and customary attitudes of mind which a conscientious reader will practise if he 25 desires to get out of a book still greater benefits than the writer of it may have designed or thought of. For example, he should never be content with mere aggressive and negatory criticism of the page before him. The page may be open to such criticism, and in that case it 20 is natural to indulge in it; but the reader will often find an unexpected profit by asking himself: What does this error teach me? How comes that fallacy to be here? How came the writer to fall into this defect of taste? To ask such questions gives a reader a far healthier tone of mind, in the long-run, more seriousness, more depth, more moderation of judgment, more insight into other men's ways of thinking—as well as into his own— than any amount of impatient condemnation and hasty denial. Again, let us not be too ready to detect an inconsistency in our author, but rather let us teach ourselves to distinguish between inconsistency and having two sides to an opinion. "Before I admit that two and two are 10 four," some one said, "I must first know to what use you are going to put the proposition." That is to say, even the plainest proposition needs to be stated with a view to the drift of the discussion in hand, or with a view to some special part of the discussion. When the 15 turn of some other part of the matter comes, it will be convenient and often necessary to bring out into full light another side of your opinion, not contradictory but complementary, and the great distinction of a candid disputant, or of a reader of good faith, is his will-20 ingness to take pains to see the points of reconciliation among different aspects and different expressions of what is substantially the same judgment. Then, again, no one needs to be reminded that the great successes of the world have been affairs of a second, 25 a third, nay, a fiftieth trial. The history of literature, of science, of art, of industrial achievements, all testify to the truth that success is only the last term of what looked like a series of failures. What is true of the great achievements of history is true also of the little achievements of the observant cultivator, of his own understanding. If a man is despondent about his work, the best remedy that I can prescribe to him is to turn to a good biography; there he will find that other men 5 before him have known the dreary reaction that follows long-sustained effort, and he will find that one of the differences between the first-rate man and the fifth-rate lies in the vigor with which the first-rate man recovers from this reaction, and crushes it down, and again flings himself once more upon the breach. I remember the wisest and most virtuous man I have ever known, or am ever likely to know—Mr. Mill3—once saying to me that whenever he had written anything, he always felt profoundly dissatisfied with it, and it was only by reflecting 10 that he had felt the same about other pieces of which the world had thought well, that he could bring himself to send the new production to the printer. The heroism of the scholar and the truth-seeker is not less admirable than the heroism of the man-at-arms. 5 15 Finally, the most central and important of all the commonplaces of the student is that the stuff of which life is made is Time; it is better, as Goethe said, to do the most trifling thing in the world than to think half an hour a trifling thing. Nobody means by this that 20 we are to have no pleasures. Where time is lost and wasted is where many people lose and waste their money-in things that are neither pleasure nor business— in those random and officious sociabilities which neither refresh nor instruct nor invigorate, but only fret and 25 benumb and wear all the edge off the mind. All these things, however, you have all of you often thought about; yet, alas! we are so ready to forget, both in these matters and in other and weightier, how irrevocable are our mistakes. "The moving Finger writes, and having writ, Nor all your tears wipe out a word of it." 3 XXXVI. ZENOBIA. BY EDWARD GIBBON.' 4 AURELIAN' had no sooner secured the person and the provinces of Tetricus than he turned his arms against Zenobia, the celebrated queen of Palmyra and the East. Modern Europe has produced several illustrious women who have sustained with glory the weight of empire; nor is our own age destitute of such distinguished characters. But if we except the doubtful achievements of Semiramis, Zenobia is perhaps the only female whose superior genius broke through the servile indolence imposed on her sex by the climate and man-10 ners of Asia. She claimed her descent from the Macedonian kings of Egypt, equalled in beauty her ancestor Cleopatra, and far surpassed that princess in valor. Zenobia was esteemed the most lovely as well as the most heroic of her sex. She was of dark complexion 15 (for in speaking of a lady these trifles become important). Her teeth were of a pearly whiteness, and her large black eyes sparkled with uncommon fire, tempered with the most attractive sweetness. Her voice was strong and harmonious. Her manly understand- 20 ing was strengthened and adorned by studying Greek, the Syriac, and the Egyptian languages. She had drawn up for her own use an epitome of Oriental history, and familiarly compared the beauties of Homer and Plato under the tuition of the sublime Longinus." 25 5 |