The Portland daily press. [volume] (Portland, Me.) 1862-1921, 1879-07-30
DR.. Holmes on Reading.
His Remarks Before the Society to En-
courage Reading at Home.

and profitable reading:
Life for man is sentence of capital pun
ishment, with respite of a few scores of years.
For woman it is the same with imprisonment
during large part of the respite. AS daugh-
ter, sister, wife, mother, aunt, grandmother
her work is, in most cases, to great extent in
door work. There are no bars or bolts to her
prison, but she cannot escape from it, as tho
inmates OF our Concord State prison do when
tired of the place.
All prisoners find something to do, or they
will feed upon their own souls and bodies
You may remember the story of the black pin
which the lady wore as brooch il will
bear repeating. Her husband had been con-
fined in prison for some political offence. He
was left alone with his thoughts to torture him.
No voice, no books, no implement, t,-silence,
darkness, misery, sleepless self-torment; and
soon it must be madness. All at once he
thought of something to occupy these terrible,
unsleeping faculties. He took pin from his
neckcloth and threw it upon the floor. Then
he groped for it. 1t was a little object, and the
search was long and laborious one. The eve
OF the Almighty, says the Eastern story teller,
can see the smaller emmett in the darkest night
on the blacklist stone. But the prisoner had not
the eye OF the Omniscient and it took him great
while to find the little object he was in search
OF. AT last he found it, and felt certain
sense of satisfaction in difficulty overcome.
But he had found great deal more than the
pin,-he had found an occupation, and every
day he would fling il from him. and lose it and
hunt for it, and at last find it, and so he saved
himself from going mad; and you will not
wonder that when he was set free and gave
the little object to which he owed his reason
and, perhaps his life, to his wife, she had it
set round with pearls and wore it next her
heart.
was never in Jail as a prisoner myself but
have been quite so badly off as if L had been
shut up on short Sentence,-confined in
quarantine at Marseilles. What can be worse
than that,-shut up as an infected person, sup
posed to carry about with him, not the COM
paratively harmless implements of robber or
burglar, not the jimmy and the revolver, but
the seeds of pestilence which will decimate
cities and devastate whole countries, which
makes one the enemy Of his race, who may be
shot but must not be touched, whom one must
get to the windward of before speaking to him,
and from whom beggar would not take dol
lar unless it had been fumigated. Well I
found myself imprisoned within four stone
walls.
had one book with me; you know what that
book ought to have been, but it was not that. 1t
was an old Latin book-villainous Latin il was
written ina history of some two or three hun
dred rare medical cases, by Nicholas Tulpius,
whose portrait some of you have seen in a fa-
nous picture of Rembrandt, or q well-known
engraving from it. How did read that one
book! was in my twenties then, but 1 re-
member many of those cases as l do not any
others that read at that period of my life I
doubt if any living man knows them as well as
L do. So much for being shut Up and having
but one book to read.
A woman in captivity to her duties is not re-
duced to such extremities as those of the un-
fortunates have mentioned. Her household
labors, whether of work or superintendence
are varied enough in most cases to avoid unen-
durable monotony.
Every woman has her needle, at any rate or
had for have been told, but hope it is not
true, that some young women of the present
day are entirely unschooled in its use. For
the lesser troubles of life when man takes to
his pipe or his cigar, il not to some more potent
and dangerous ansesthetic, woman takes her
sewing or knitting. The needle points are to
her nervous irritability what the lightning rod
is to the electricity of the storm cloud.
But the work of hemming handkerchiefs
and towels, of knitting mittens and even af-
ghans-this and those other household labors
from which few are wholly exempted, are not
enough to take up all the mental energy of the
busiest young woman. What did they do be-
fore the day of printed books? They carried
the songs of their tribe of their nation-the
songs which were the best part of their liters-
ture-in their memory. Now the rivulet which,
the press poured out four centuries ago has
widened with every succeeding generation un-
til 1t is no longer stream within its banks,
but an inundation. Books reviews maya.
zines, newspapers come in upon us like the
flood, and the landmarks Of our old literature
are lost sight of, If they are not swept away
There never was time when young readers
were III Sucn neeQ OF guidance.
Let me touch very slightly three questions
suggested by this state of things.
l. Shall we read-that is, shall we make
serious business of reading? This seems a
strange question to ask, but let me give some
meaning to it. 1t was at the hospitable board
OF this very house that I heard the late Mr.
Edward Everett tell story of Lord Palmer
ston which have never forgotten and often
repeated. Some one asked him, "Have YOU
read certain book?" naming it. 81 never
read printed books, was Lord Palmerstons an
swer. Mr.. Everett did not explain or account
for this answer, so far as / remember, but
suppose he meant he had enough to do with
reading documents, newspapers, the faces and
characters OF men, and listening to their con-
versatlon TO 1nd out what they meant-per-
haps quite as often what they did not mean
Some persons need reading much more than
others. One of the best preachers have known
read comparatively little. But he talked and
listened and kept his mind sufficiently nour-
ished without overburdening it. On the other
hand, one OF the most brilliant men / have
known was always reading. He read more
than his mind could fairly digest, and brilliant
as he was, his conversation had too much the
character OF those patchwork quilts one sees at
country cattle shows, so variegated was it with
all sorts of quotations
The first time ever visited Theodore Par
ker he was not quite 30 years old, and own
that his reputation as a scholar had not reached
me. In looking round his library saw upon
his shelves the great series of quartos-which
l knew by their title only, if at all-Brucker's
Historic Critica Philosophe. "You have
hardly read that, suppose" 1 said not think
ing that any student, in these degenerate days,
grappled with these megatherial monsters Of
primitive erudition. "Oh yes, have" he
answered very quietly; and then l. who
thought was dealing with modest young
divine OF the regulation pattern, took another
look at the massive head of the young man,
whom Mr. Wendell Phillips has lately spoken
OF as the Jupiter of the pulpit
somewhere between these two extremes
most OF us lind ourselves. But we must re-
member the French saying, "Pdppeth rent en-
mdngent,' or as Hamlet would phrase it, in
crease OF appetite grows by what it feeds on;
and If we do not love books enough naturally,
we must acquire the habit of loving them, If
possible, as people acquire bad habits, that of
lntoxication or opium eating, beginning with
little, and trusting that by and by we shall
thirst for more
2. What shall we read? 1 am very thank
full that it does not fall to my lot to answer
this question do honestly assure you had
rather ask this question of the ladies and gem
tlemen who have undertaken to direct. the
home studies of those who are fortunate
enough to be under their guidance, than to
answer It, What infinite waste of labor might
not such guidance have saved me, could have
had it, and have had wisdom and good sense to
proht by it, at certain period of my life 1
congratulate you most sincerely and deeply
that the thoroughly cultivated intelligence of
lie scuolarS VINO surround me has been made
tributary to your advancement in sound knowl-
edge and wholesome training. 1t is task of
great difficulty to point out the proper apti-
tudes and different stages of education. In
this inundation of literature have spoken Of
most young minds will be overpowered by
some flood or other.
The daughters of Danaus are not all dead
yet; on the contrary, their number is legion.
All those young women who pass their days
and nights in reading endless story-books-
novels, so called, doubtless from their want of
novelty-what are they doing but pouring
water into buckets whose bottoms are as full of
holes as cullender, and which would have
nothing to show if Niagara had been emptied
into them?
3. How shall we read? must answer this
question very briefly believe in reading, in
large proportion, by subjects rather than by
authors.
Some books must be read tasting, as it were,
every word Tennyson will bear that as Mil
ton would, as Gray would-for they tasted
every, word themselves, as Ude or Careme
would taste a potdge meant for king or
queen. But, once become familiar with
subject, 50 as to know what you wish to learn
about 1t, and you can read page as a flash Of
lightning reads it. Learn lesson from Hou-
din and his sons practice, of looking in at
SlOD window and rpmemherinU all tbav