Children and Their Books | Page 5

to killing time, when association with the right
reading in early life would have taught them to cultivate that inward
eye which has been called the bliss of solitude. He who has a love of
reading, however limited his means or however restricted his
opportunities may give himself, if he will, a good education. He, who
has a taste for good books in youth, will rarely read anything else in
maturer years.
"From the total training during childhood," says President Eliot, "there
should result in the child a taste for interesting and improving reading,

which should direct and inspire its subsequent intellectual life. That
schooling which results in this taste for good reading, however,
unsystematic or eccentric the schooling may have been, has achieved a
main end of elementary education; and that schooling which does not
result in implanting this permanent taste has failed. Guided and
animated by this impulse to acquire knowledge and exercise his
imagination through reading, the individual will continue to educate
himself all through life. Without that deep-rooted impulsion he will
soon cease to draw on the accumulated wisdom of the past and the new
resources of the present, and as he grows older, he will live in a mental
atmosphere which is always growing thinner and emptier. Do we not
all know many people who seem to live in a mental vacuum--to whom
indeed, we have great difficulty in attributing immortality because they
apparently have so little life except that of the body? Fifteen minutes a
day of good reading would have given any one of this multitude a
really human life. The uplifting of the democratic masses depends on
this implanting at school of the taste for good reading."
The great men of letters have usually been those who have been
accustomed to good books from the mother's knee. Where the taste for
reading has not been inherited it must be acquired by continuous effort
and some of the world's greatest achievements have been made by men
who toiled on in poverty and distress to improve their faculties. There
is no fact more uniformly evident in the biographies of great men than
that they read great books in youth. Nicolay and Hay say of Abraham
Lincoln:--
"When his tasks ended, his studies became the chief pleasure of his life.
In all the intervals of his work--in which he never took delight,
knowing well enough that he was born for something better than that,
he read, wrote, and ciphered incessantly. His reading was naturally
limited by his opportunities, for books were among the rarest of
luxuries in that region and time. But he read everything he could lay his
hands upon, and he was certainly fortunate in the few books of which
he became the possessor. It would hardly be possible to select a better
handful of classics for a youth in his circumstances than the few
volumes he turned with a nightly and daily hand--the Bible, "Aesop's

Fables," "Robinson Crusoe," "The Pilgrim's Progress," a history of the
United States, and Weem's "Life of Washington". These were the best,
and these he read over and over till he knew them almost by heart. But
his voracity for anything printed was insatiable. He would sit in the
twilight and read a dictionary as long as he could see. He used to go to
David Turnham's, the town constable, and devour the "Revised Statutes
of Indiana," as boys in our day do the "Three Guardsmen." Of the
books he did not own he took voluminous notes, filling his copy-book
with choice extracts, and poring over them until they were fixed in his
memory. He could not afford to waste paper upon his original
compositions. He would sit by the fire at night and cover the wooden
shovel with essays and arithmetical exercises, which he would shave
off and then begin again. It is touching to think of this great-spirited
child, battling year after year against his evil star, wasting his ingenuity
upon devices and makeshifts, his high intelligence starving for want of
the simple appliances of education, that are now offered gratis to the
poorest and most indifferent. He did a man's work from the time he left
school; his strength and stature were already far beyond those of
ordinary men. He wrought his appointed tasks ungrudgingly, though
without enthusiasm; but when his employer's day was over his own
began."
Boys like Abraham Lincoln may be relied upon to direct their own
reading, but the average child is unable to do this. An important
thought which is not always kept in mind by educators is stated thus by
Huxley:--"If I am a knave or a fool, teaching me to read and write won't
make me less of either one of the other--unless somebody shows me
how to put my