suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain that the
farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words
which he has heard. Men sometimes speak as if the
study of the classics would at length make way for more
modern and practical studies; but the adventurous
student will always study classics, in whatever language
they may be written and however ancient they may be.
For what are the classics but the noblest recorded
thoughts of man ? They are the only oracles which are
not decayed, and there are such answers to the most
modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never
gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because
she is old. To read well, that is, to read true books in
a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task
the reader more than any exercise which the customs of
the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes
underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life
to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and
reservedly as they were written. It is not enough even
to be able to speak the language of that nation by which
they are written, for there is a memorable interval be-
tween the spoken and the written language, the lan-
guage heard and the language read. The one is com-
monly transitory, a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely,
almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the
brutes, of our mothers. The other is the maturity and
experience of that ; if that is our mother tongue, this is
our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too
significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be
born again in order to speak. The crowds of men who
merely spoke the Greek and Latin tongues in the Mid-
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