kindling wood. Intellectual lightning may strike the "browser" as he
stands there book in hand before the shelf. A word, a phrase, may sear
into his brain--may turn the current of his whole life. And even if no
such epoch-making words meet his eye, in how brief a time may he read,
digest, appreciate, some of the gems of literature! Leigh Hunt's "Jennie
kissed me" would probably take about thirty seconds; on a second reading
he would have it by heart--the joy of a life-time. How many meaty epigrams
would take as long? The whole of Gray's "Elegy" is hardly beyond the
browser's limit.

In an editorial on the Harvard Classics in the "Chicago evening post",
(April 22), we read, "the cultural tabloid has very little virtue;... to
gain everything that a book has to give one must be submerged in it,
saturated and absorbed". This is very much like saying, "there is very
little nourishment in a sandwich; to get the full effect of a luncheon you
must eat everything on the table". It is a truism to say that you can not
get everything in a book without reading all of it; but it by no means
follows that the virtue of less than the whole is negligible.

So much for the direct effect of what one may thus take in, bit by bit.
The indirect effect is even more important. For by sampling a whole
literature, as he does, he not only gets a bird's-eye view of it, but he
finds out what lie likes and what he dislikes; he begins to form his
taste. Are you afraid that he will form it wrong? I am not. We are
assuming that the library where he browses is a good one; here is no
chance of evil, only a choice between different kinds of good. And even if
the evil be there, it is astonishing how the healthy mind will let it slip
and fasten eagerly on the good. Would you prefer a taste fixed by someone
who tells the browser what he ought to like? Then that is not the reader's
own taste at all, but that of his informant. We have too much of this sort