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Show SOME HINTS ON READING. Shall we read -- that is, shall we make a serious business of reading? This seems a strange question to ask, but let me give some meaning to it. It was at the hospitable board of this very house that I heard ? Edward Everett tell a story of ????, which I have never ???? repeated. Some ???? never read printed ???? was Lord Palmerston's answer????. Everett did not explain or account for this answer, so far as I remember, but I suppose he meant that he had enough to do with reading written documents, newspapers, the faces and characters of men, and listening to their conversation to find out what they meant - perhaps quite as often what they did not mean. Some persons need reading much more than others. One of the best preachers I have known read comparatively little. But he talked and listened, and kept his mind sufficiently nourished, without overburdening it. On the other hand, one of the most brilliant men I have know? [known]? was always reading. He read more than his mind could fairly digest, and, brilliant as he was, his conversation had too much the character of those patch-work quilts one sees at country cattle-shows, so variegated was it with all sorts of quotations. . . . We must remember the French saying, "L'appetit ? en mangeant," or, as Hamlet would phrase it, increase of appetite grows by what it feeds on; and if we do not love books enough naturally, we must acquire the habit of loving them, if possible, as people acquire bad habits, that of intoxication or opium-eating, beginning with a little, and trusting that by and by we shall thirst for more. What shall we read? I am very thankful that it does not fall to my lot to answer this question. I do honestly assure you I had rather ask this question of the ladies and gentlemen who have undertaken to direct the home studies of those who are fortunate enough to be under their guidance than to answer it. What infinite waste of labor might not such guidance have saved me! It is a task of great difficulty to point out the proper course for so many minds of different natural aptitudes and different stages of education. In this inundation of literature I have spoken of, most young minds will be overwhelmed? by some flood? or other. The Daughters? of ? are not all dead yet; on the contrary, their number is legion. All those young women who pass their days and nights in reading endless story-books, novels, so-called, doubtless from their want of novelty, what are they doing but pouring water into buckets whose bottoms are as full of holes as a colander, and which would have nothing to show if Niagara had been emptied into them! How shall we read? I must answer this question very briefly. I believe in reading, in a large proportion, by subjects rather than by authors. Some books must be read, tasting as it were, every word. Tennyson will bear that as Milton would, as Gray would, for they tasted every word themselves, as Ude? or Carome? would taste a potage meant for a king or a queen. But once become familiar with a subject, so as to know what you wish to learn about it, and you can read a page as a flash of lightening reads it. Learn a lesson from Houdin and his son's practice of looking in at a shop-window and remembering all they saw. Learn to read a page in the shortest possible time, and to stand a thorough examination on its contents.-- O. W. Holmes. |