“The most important step toward getting mental power is the acquisition of a right method in work and a just standard of attainment,” says President Elliot. The secret of success in reading is concentration. The mind must be focused like a lens on just those books and just those parts of them that are needed to accomplish the desired object. Have a definite purpose and do not allow yourself to be turned aside from it. There are those who read merely to get over a certain number of pages and say that they have read a book. Printed words run before their eyes and make no impression on their minds. In this age of hurry many rush through books as trains rush through tunnels.

The true reader makes his reading give an account of itself. After you have read a few pages stop and think it over and arrange it in your mind. It takes time to ripen, the best growth is slow.

We can no more become acquainted with a book on a single reading than we can know a man on a single meeting. “Between reading and study there is the same difference as between a guest and a friend,” said St. Bernard. Ruskin thought that reading the same thing over and over again aided him greatly in getting thoroughly to the bottom of matters; and Dr. W. T. Harris has remarked, “it is my experience with great world poets that the first reading yields the smallest harvest. Each succeeding reading becomes more profitable in geometrical ratio. At first, Dante’s Divine Comedy was a dumb show written over with hard, dogmatic inscriptions. It has become to me the most eloquent exposition of human freedom and divine grace.”

Bacon tells us that books are to be read in different ways. Some are to be read here and there, others to be skimmed and a few to be studied. Be content with gradual progress, the best growth is slow, but keep constantly at it. Milton speaks of “industrious and select reading,” and that is the only kind that gives true culture.

Says Walt Whitman, “the process of reading is not a half sleep, but in the highest sense, an exercise, a gymnastic struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay—the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or framework.”

“Men give me some credit for genius. All the genius I have lies in this: when I have a subject in hand I study it profoundly; day and night it is before me. I explore it in all its bearings. My mind becomes pervaded with it. Then the effort which I make the people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought.”—Daniel Webster.

We must recognize the fact that there are many books of great value to others that have no message for us. We may waste time in reading good books that we do not understand. “It is of paramount importance,” says Schopenhauer, “to acquire the art not to read.”

Books should be ladders to lift us to a higher mental plane. No matter how long or how industriously we read, we can never be elevated by trash. The more literature we ponder on and make our own the better we are for it, but the little thoughts of inferior men though they may serve to occupy our minds can never improve them. And on the other hand the habit of associating with the thoughts of noble men gives health and robustness to the mind, which does not grow unless it is exerted on something worthy of its strength.

The books that help us most are those which demand the exercise of our highest powers, books which have a clear and definite purpose and that appeal to the best that is in us. Such books are not to be understood all at once, but every time we re-read them we get new light upon them. We should not force ourselves to read what we do not understand, but should read the best that we can enjoy and if that is not the best there is, it will be in time if we persevere.

No other occupation is so well adapted to the profitable employment of moments of leisure as reading. At any place, at any time, without preparation we may read. Books are always ready to do for us all that our mental state will admit. No man was ever so wretched that he could not claim and receive the companionship and sympathy of the best thought of the best men. No life is so cheerless that it cannot be brightened by books.

Doctor Johnson thought that the most miserable man is he who cannot read on a rainy day. How much those miss who have no love of reading, how time must hang heavily on their hands in illness, in bad weather, in the long evenings. Emerson liked to read and study in a tumultuous privacy of storm.

Reading is often the only pleasure of the sick, bringing to their rooms the heroes of all ages and the scenes of all climes so that they may forget their sufferings in sailing the ocean with Columbus, or leaving the smoke and turmoil of the city they may wander with Thoreau in leafy nooks by the crystal waters of Walden. Sitting in a poor room, ill-fed and ragged a man may entertain Sir Walter Scott or Lord Macaulay and dismiss them without ceremony when he tires of them. The fact that we can stop the talk of a book at will is one of the greatest advantages of reading. Lord Macaulay might have bored one but his books never do.

Reading is the great solace of old age and is one of the few pleasures which increases as the years go by.

Life should be a happy medium between the practical and the ideal; those successful men of business who have no taste for literature often appreciate their deficiencies quite as much as do the impractical idealists who have never accomplished anything of real value. Darwin devoted his mental energies so entirely to the consideration of facts, that he lost all taste for imaginative literature and deeply regretted that his mind in this respect was warped and one sided.

There are, however, many men who have become so dulled by the practicalities of business that they consider it a waste of time to read anything but the newspapers or the reports of the stock market. The pleasure to be gotten from Shakespeare or Tennyson such persons will never know.

Lack of time is made an excuse for superficial accomplishment, but no one is so busy that he cannot find time to read if he will but diligently make the most of his opportunities. “Dost thou value life,” said Franklin, “then do not waste time for that is the stuff life is made of.” “In studies, whatsoever a man commandeth upon himself, let him set hours for it,” says Bacon, but, he adds, “whatsoever is agreeable to his nature, let him take no care for any set hours, for his thoughts will fly to it of themselves.”

A small fixed period devoted to study every day is far better than a longer time given occasionally. The result is not only greater but the mental effect is better. For by devoting a certain time every day to the consideration of noble thoughts your mind which grows by what it feeds on is given food for reflection so that it increases in power even when you are not reading.

There are books not only for all sorts and conditions of men but also for all the varying circumstances of the life of each and for all the different mental phases through which they may pass. A book may have a message for every one but not the same message for each; one it may encourage, another it may rebuke; one it may lead further in the path he is treading, another it may stop and turn into a better way. Habits of thought due to inheritance or occupation modify and in some measure determine the effect of a book and the nature of its message for each reader.

You should adapt books to your mental state, after a hard day’s work the mind easily wearies, while with the strength of the morning you may read the very best that you are capable of. Read the hardest book first and as your mind tires lay it aside and take up something easier. When you find that you are not appreciating what you read stop and give your mind a rest.

What we read depends upon our taste and taste determines character and is determined by character. Taste may be cultivated and improved by always preferring the higher to the lower when we have an opportunity to make a choice, by improving the surroundings and associations, by unconscious influence as well as by conscious effort. There is only one way in which a love for good literature may be gained and that is by reading good literature. People talk about the English classics and at last almost convince themselves that they are familiar with them but how many do you know who have really read Shakespeare?

There are constant allusions in literature and in life to books with which everyone is supposed to be acquainted, such as the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare, Pilgrim’s Progress, Scott and Longfellow. One cannot always choose his business in life, sometimes he is forced to do the first thing that comes to hand, but he need not engage in any recreation that he does not choose and it is his own fault if his pleasures are mean ones. We often meet people whose minds seem flat and stale because they derive their highest inspiration from nothing more elevating than the daily papers.

A common knowledge of a good book may be at once the foundation of mutual understanding and friendship. It establishes a bond of sympathy between minds cultivated and informed by contact with noble thoughts. Such sympathy is impossible for those whose minds owing to lack of reading dwell ever in the present amid material things.

Do not content yourself with reading the observations of others; be an observer yourself. Your reading should teach you to observe, but some persons stultify themselves so by constant reading that they lose the power to perceive. Our minds grow by exertion rather than by passive reception. We are put in the world not only to accomplish a certain amount of work, but also to develop our mental and spiritual powers to the fullest extent; to make the most of ourselves.

By taking an interest in what is going on around us we may add a new charm to life. We are surrounded by the wonderful and inspiring but only the great man or woman has the sense to see it; for all the rest life is hopelessly commonplace. The man who finds the most to admire gets the most enjoyment out of life. The study of nature teaches us to appreciate much that is beautiful in literature, and, on the other hand, books help us to enjoy many things about us that otherwise we should not have noticed. Men with finer faculties than ourselves have observed and recorded for us beauties that without their aid we should have been unable to perceive. “Books,” said Dryden, “are spectacles to read nature.”

The power of a book to stimulate the mind is one of its most useful qualities. Some books are more valuable for what they make us think than for what they actually say. It is the reading that we make the most of, whose substance incorporates itself with our mental equipment, that develops and enlarges our faculties. What we read and assimilate becomes part of the character. Rousseau’s Emile, for instance, is one of the most suggestive books ever written; Pestalozzi, Froebel, Herbert Spencer and many other educational thinkers have derived their inspiration from Rousseau. Emerson is especially valuable for the new trains of thought which he suggests. Furthermore a book is far from useless when it arouses thoughtful dissent. Passages in the Emile have furnished the texts for discussions that have marked advances in educational thought.

We form our characters from the men and books that we associate with. We cannot always choose our companions but we can choose our books, and it is our own fault if they are mean books. A man may be known better by the books he reads than by the company he keeps, we should be quite as likely to find a judge making a companion of a pickpocket or gambler as to find a low-minded man reading an essay by Lowell or Emerson. Tell me what you read and I will tell you what you are. It is what we take an interest in that stamps us.

Matthew Arnold gives a concise definition of culture when he says that it is “to know the best that has been thought and said in the world,” and he makes this idea clearer by saying “culture is reading, but reading with a purpose to guide it and with system.” He elsewhere states, “Culture is a study of the perfection which consists in becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.” Self-activity is called by Sir William Hamilton the primary principle of education. By lovingly reading the best books we may go on, year after year, giving ourselves a fuller education than can be gained in any university, because it is life long;—eternity long. Such an education requires time rather than money and any one who has the determination to improve himself, may like Sir William Jones “with the fortune of a peasant give himself the education of a prince.”

To read good books in a proper manner adds to life a charm whose infinite variety age cannot wither nor custom stale. It was Huxley, the man of science who said, “literature is the greatest of all sources of refined pleasure and one of the great uses of a liberal education is to enable us to enjoy that pleasure.” The gain is immense when we have learned to like the things that are improving rather than those that merely entertain. The remark of Samuel Royce that whenever intellectual pleasures are in the ascendant civilization progresses, and whenever sensual pleasures predominate civilization is on the wane, is as true of the individual as of the race. The nations which have made an impression on history have done so by intellectual vigor and not by brute force. It is ideas not arms that determine destinies and books are the vehicle of ideas.