literature can do for us is to enter the libraries of great men and see
what books have done for the acknowledged leaders of our race.

You will recall John Stuart Mill's experience in reading Wordsworth.
Mill was a man of letters as well as a scientific economist and
philosopher, and we expect to find that men of letters have been
nourished on literature; reading must necessarily have been a large
part of their professional preparation. The examples of men of action
who have been molded and inspired by books will perhaps be more helpful
to remember; for most of us are not to be writers or to engage in
purely intellectual work; our ambitions point to a thousand different
careers in the world of action.

Lincoln was not primarily a man of letters, although he wrote noble
prose on occasion, and the art of expression was important, perhaps
indispensable, in his political success. He read deeply in the law and
in books on public questions. For general literature he had little
time, either during his early struggles or after his public life began,
and his autobiographical memorandum contains the significant words:
"Education defective." But these more significant words are found in a
letter which he wrote to Hackett, the player: "Some of Shakespeare's
plays I have never read, while others I have gone over perhaps as
frequently as any unprofessional reader. Among the latter are 'Lear,'
'Richard III,' 'Henry VIII,' 'Hamlet,' and, especially, 'Macbeth.'"

If he had not read these masterpieces, no doubt he would have become
President just the same and guided the country through its terrible
difficulties; but we may be fairly sure that the high philosophy by
which he lifted the political differences of his day above partisan
quarrels, the command of words which gives his letters and speeches