authors of the best English Literature as gave them a desire to read
more.

[Books as Teachers]

In one of his sermons Dr. David Swing of Chicago said: "Much as you may
have studied the languages or the sciences, that which most affected you
was the moral lessons in the series of McGuffey. And yet the reading
class was filed out only once a day to read for a few moments, and
then we were all sent to our seats to spend two hours in learning
how to bound New Hampshire or Connecticut, or how long it would take a
greyhound to overtake a fox or a hare if the spring of each was so and
so, and the poor fugitive had such and such a start. That was perhaps
well, but we have forgotten how to bound Connecticut, and how to solve
the equation of the field and thicket; but up out of the far-off years
come all the blessed lessons in virtue and righteousness which those
reading books taught; and when we now remember, how even these moral
memories have faded I cannot but wish the teachers had made us bound the
States less, and solve fewer puzzles in 'position' and the 'cube root'
and made us commit to memory the whole series of the McGuffey Eclectic
Headers. The memory that comes from these far-away pages is full of the
best wisdom of time or the timeless land. In these books we were indeed
led by a schoolmaster, from beautiful maxims for children up to the
best thoughts of a long line of sages, and poets, and naturalists. There
we all first learned the awful weakness of the duel that took away a
Hamilton; there we saw the grandeur of the Blind Preacher of William
Wirt; there we saw the emptiness of the ambition of Alexander, and there
we heard even the infidel say, 'Socrates died like a philosopher, but
Jesus Christ like a God.'"