Perhaps you think no books were ever so written?

But, again, I ask you, do you at all believe in honesty, or at all
in kindness, or do you think there is never any honesty or
benevolence in wise people? None of us, I hope, are so unhappy as
to think that. Well, whatever bit of a wise man's work is honestly
and benevolently done, that bit is his book or his piece of art. {5}
It is mixed always with evil fragments--ill-done, redundant,
affected work. But if you read rightly, you will easily discover
the true bits, and those ARE the book.

Now books of this kind have been written in all ages by their
greatest men:- by great readers, great statesmen, and great
thinkers. These are all at your choice; and Life is short. You
have heard as much before;--yet have you measured and mapped out
this short life and its possibilities? Do you know, if you read
this, that you cannot read that--that what you lose to-day you
cannot gain to-morrow? Will you go and gossip with your housemaid,
or your stable-boy, when you may talk with queens and kings; or
flatter yourself that it is with any worthy consciousness of your
own claims to respect, that you jostle with the hungry and common
crowd for ENTREE here, and audience there, when all the while this
eternal court is open to you, with its society, wide as the world,
multitudinous as its days, the chosen, and the mighty, of every
place and time? Into that you may enter always; in that you may
take fellowship and rank according to your wish; from that, once
entered into it, you can never be outcast but by your own fault; by
your aristocracy of companionship there, your own inherent
aristocracy will be assuredly tested, and the motives with which you
strive to take high place in the society of the living, measured, as