asking oneself: "Have I got the best out of life?"

As we make the survey, it will surely happen that our eyes fall on many
writers whom the stress of life, or spiritual indolence, has prevented
us from using as all the while they have been eager to be used; friends
we might have made yet never have made, neglected counsellors we would
so often have done well to consult, guides that could have saved us
many a wrong turning in the difficult way. There, in unvisited corners
of our shelves, what neglected fountains of refreshments, gardens in
which we have never walked, hills we have never climbed!

"Well," we say with a sigh, "a man cannot read everything; it is life
that has interrupted our studies, and probably the fact is that we have
accumulated more books than we really need." The young reader's
appetite is largely in his eyes, and it is very natural for one who is
born with a taste for books to gather them about him at first
indiscriminately, on the hearsay recommendation of fame, before he
really knows what his own individual tastes are, or are going to be,
and in that wistful survey I have imagined, our eyes will fall, too,
with some amusement, on not a few volumes to which we never have had
any really personal relation, and which, whatever their distinction or
their value for others, were never meant for us. The way to do with
such books is to hand them over to some one who has a use for them. On
our shelves they are like so much good thrown away, invitations to
entertainments for which we have no taste. In all vital libraries, such
a process of progressive refection is continually going on, and to
realize what we do not want in books, or cannot use, must, obviously,
be a first principle in our getting the best out of them.

Yes, we read too many books, and too many that, as they do not really