Books are to mankind what memory is to the individual.They contain the history of our race,the
discoverise we have made,the accumulated knowledge and experience of ages;they picture for us the
miracles and beauties of nature,help us in our difficulties,comfort us in sorrow and in suffering,
change hours to weariness into moments of delight,store our minds with ideas,fill them with good and
happy thoughts,and lift us out of and above ourselves.Many of those who have had,as we say,all that
this world can give,have yet told us they owed much of their purest happiness to books.Macaulay had
wealth and fame,rank and power,and yet he tells us in his biography that he owed the happiest hours
of his life to books.He says,"If any one would make me the greatest king that ever lived,with
palaces and gardens and fine dinners,and wines and coaches,and beautiful clothes,and hundreds of
servants,on condition that I should not read books,I would not be a king;I would rather be a poor
man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who didn't love reading.Precious and priceless are
the blessings which the books scatter around our daily paths.We talk,in imagination,with the noblest
spirits,through the most solemn and charming reions.Without stirring from our firesides we may roam
to the most remote regions of the earth,or soar into realms when Spenser's shapes of unearthly
beauty flock to meet us,where Miltion's angels peal in our ears the choral hymns of Paradise.Science
art,literature,philosophy,all that man has thought,all that man has done,the experience that has
been bought with the sufferings of a hundred generations,all are garnered up for us in the world of
books.