# The Best Hundred Books/Mr. Lowell on the Choice of Books

Mr. J. R. Lowell on the Choice of Books.
MR. J. RUSSELL LOWELL in his address at the dedication of the Free Public Library, Chelsea, Massachusetts, just before Christmas, said:—Have you ever rightly considered what the mere ability to read means? That it is the key that admits us to the whole world of thought and fancy and imagination, to the company of saint and sage, of the wisest and the wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moments? That it enables us to see with the keenest eyes, hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time? More than that, it annihilates time and space for us; it revives for us without a miracle the Age of Wonder, endowing us with the shoes of swiftness and the cap of darkness, so that we walk invisible like fern seed, and witness unharmed the plague at Athens or Florence or London, accompanying Cæsar on his marches, or look in on Catiline in council with his fellow-conspirators, or Guy Fawkes in the cellar of St. Stephen's.
There is a choice in books as in friends; and the mind sinks or rises to the level of its habitual society is subdued, as Shakspeare says of the dyer's hand, to what it works in. Cato's advice, "Consort with the good," is quite as true if we extend it to books; for they, too, insensibly give away their own nature to the mind that converses with them. They either beckon upward or drag down. And it is certainly true that the material of thought reacts upon the thought itself. Milton makes his fallen angels grow small to enter the infernal council room; but the soul, which God meant to be the spacious chamber where high thoughts and generous aspirations might commune together, shrinks and narrows itself to the measure of the meaner company that is wont to gather there, hatching conspiracies against our better selves. We are apt to wonder at the scholarship of the men of three centuries ago, and at a certain dignity of phrase that characterizes them. They were scholars because they did not read so many things as we. They had fewer books, but these were of the best. Their speech was noble, because they lunched with Plutarch and supped with Plato. We spend as much time over print as they did; but, instead of communing with the choice thoughts of choice spirits, and unconsciously acquiring the grand manner of that supreme society, we diligently inform ourselves, and cover the Continent with a network of speaking wires to inform us, of such inspiring facts as that a horse belonging to Mr. Smith ran away on Wednesday, seriously damaging a valuable carryall; that a son of Mr. Brown swallowed a hickory nut on Thursday; and that a gravel bank had caved in and buried Mr. Robinson alive on Friday. Alas, it is we ourselves that are getting buried alive under this avalanche of earthy impertinences! It is we who, while we might each in his humble way be helping our fellows into the right path, or adding one block to the climbing spire of a fine soul, are willing to become mere sponges saturated from the stagnant goose pond of village gossip.
One is sometimes asked by young people to recommend a course of reading. My advice would be that they should confine themselves to the supreme books in whatever literature, or, still better, to choose some one great author, and make themselves thoroughly familiar with him. For as all roads lead to Rome, so do they
likewise lead away from it; and you will find that, in order to understand perfectly and weigh exactly any vital piece of literature, you will be gradually and pleasantly persuaded to excursions and explorations of which you little dreamed when you began, and will find yourselves scholars before you are aware.
A library should contain ample stores of history. History is, indeed, mainly the biography of a few imperial men, and forces home upon us the useful lesson how infinitesimally important our own private affairs are to the universe in general. History is clarified experience; and yet how little do men profit by it! Nay, how should we expect it of those who so seldom are taught anything by their own? Delusions, especially economical delusions, seem the only things that have any chance of an earthly immortality.
A public library should also have many and full shelves of political economy; for the "dismal science," if it prove nothing else, will go far towards proving that the millennium will not hasten its coming in deference to the most convincing string of resolutions that were ever unanimously adopted in public meeting. It likewise induces in us a profound distrust of social panaceas.
I would have a public library abundant in translations of the best books in all languages; yet some acquaintance with foreign and ancient literature has the liberating effect of foreign travel. He who travels by translation travels more hastily and superficially, but brings home something that is worth having, nevertheless. Translations, properly used, by shortening the labour of acquisition, add as many years to our lives as they subtract from the processes of our education.
In such a library, the sciences should be fully ​represented, that men may at least learn to know in what a marvellous museum they live, what a wonder-worker is giving them an exhibition daily for nothing. Nor let art be forgotten in all its many forms; not as the antithesis of science, but as her elder or fairer sister, whom we love all the more that her usefulness cannot be demonstrated in dollars and cents. I should be thankful if every day labourer among us could have his mind illumined, as those of Athens and Florence had, with some image of what is best in architecture, painting, and sculpture, to train his crude perceptions and perhaps call out latent faculties. I should like to see the works of Ruskin within the reach of every artisan among us; for I hope some day that the delicacy of touch and accuracy of eye that have made our mechanics in some departments the best in the world may give us the same supremacy in works of wider range and more purely ideal scope.
Of voyages and travels I would also have good store, especially the earlier, when the world was fresh and unhackneyed, and men saw things invisible to the modern eye. They are fast sailing ships to waft away from present trouble to the Fortunate Isles.
To wash down the drier morsels that every library must necessarily offer at its board, let there be plenty of imaginative literature, and let its range be not too narrow to stretch from Dante to the elder Dumas. The world of imagination is not the world of abstraction and nonentity, as some conceive, but a world formed out of chaos by the sense of the beauty that is in man and the earth on which he dwells. It is the realm of might-be, our haven of refuge from the shortcomings and disillusions of life. It is, to quote Spenser, who knew it well, "the world's sweet inn from care and wearisome turmoil."