Let me add that
ours is in no sense a collector's library. Each book was procured
because some one of the family wished to read it. We could never afford
to take overmuch thought for the outsides of books; we were too much
interested in their insides.
Now and then I am asked as to "what books a statesman should read," and
my answer is, poetry and novels--including short stories under the
head of novels. I don't mean that he should read only novels and modern
poetry. If he cannot also enjoy the Hebrew prophets and the Greek
dramatists, he should be sorry. He ought to read interesting books on
history and government, and books of science and philosophy; and really
good books on these subjects are as enthralling as any fiction ever
written in prose or verse. Gibbon and Macaulay, Herodotus, Thucydides
and Tacitus, the Heimskringla, Froissart, Joinville and Villehardouin,
Parkman and Mahan, Mommsen and Ranke--why! there are scores and scores
of solid histories, the best in the world, which are as absorbing as
the best of all the novels, and of as permanent value. The same thing
is true of Darwin and Huxley and Carlyle and Emerson, and parts of Kant,
and of volumes like Sutherland's "Growth of the Moral Instinct," or
Acton's Essays and Lounsbury's studies--here again I am not trying to
class books together, or measure one by another, or enumerate one in a
thousand of those worth reading, but just to indicate that any man or
woman of some intelligence and some cultivation can in some line or
other of serious thought, scientific or historical or philosophical or
economic or governmental, find any number of books which are charming to
read, and which in addition give that for which his or her soul hungers.
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