constitute, for practical purposes, an unbroken duration of time, is
to emancipate one's self from dependence on particular times, and to
appropriate all time to one's use; and in like manner to accustom
one's self to make use of all places, however thronged and public, as
if they were private and secluded, is to free one's self from bondage
to a particular locality, or to surroundings specially chosen for the
purpose. Those who have abundance of leisure to spend in their
libraries are beyond the need of suggestions as to the use of time and
place; but those whose culture must be secured incidentally, as it
were, need not despair,--they have shining examples of successful use
of limited opportunities about them. It is not only possible to make
all time enrich us, but to use all space as if it were our own. To
have a book in one's pocket and the power of fastening one's mind upon
it to the exclusion of every other object or interest is to be
independent of the library, with its unbroken quietness. It is to
carry the library with us,--not only the book, but the repose.

One bright June morning a young man, who happened to be waiting at a
rural station to take a train, discovered one of the foremost of
American writers, who was, all things considered, perhaps the most
richly cultivated man whom the country has yet produced, sitting on
the steps intent upon a book, and entirely oblivious of his
surroundings. The young man's reverence for the poet and critic filled
him with desire to know what book had such power of beguiling into
forgetfulness one of the noblest minds of the time. He affirmed within
himself that it must be a novel. He ventured to approach near enough
to read the title, holding, rightly enough, that a book is not
personal property, and that his act involved no violation of privacy.
He discovered that the great man was reading a Greek play with such
relish and abandon that he had turned a railway station into a private