The daily Gate City. [volume] (Keokuk, Iowa) 1855-1916, 1911-06-04
WHEN FRIENDS FAIL

l1FCi tliiHS, SNeTy influence t0Ht
helps man to make his life stronger
sweeter and better will be gratefully
seized upon by the hopeful soul and
brought into use. Most good of all
1t is to know and cherish human
championships, for there is an in
comparable joy and strength in the
vigorous hand-clasp and friendly light
in the eye of a friend But at other
seasons when our friends have failed
US, perhaps, there is nothing that can
offer such comfort and fine, silent
friendship and help as good books.
says the Buffalo News
ITO use books rightly is TO go to them
for help; to appeal to them when
our knowledge and power of
thought fails; to be led by them
into wider sight, purer concep-
ton than our own, and receive
from them the united sentence OF
the judges and councils of all time,
against our solitary and unstable
opinion
1t is through books that we of the
present age are bound by wonderful
debt to the great minds of former
ages. II we have gained and knowl-
edge of the truth it is through the
guidance of good books. They fill
the minds of ourselves and our fellows
with noble and graceful images. Coco
books are friends that will stand by
one through all vicissitudes they will
prove comforters in sorrow, nurses in
sickness, compaions in solitude.
Nothing can change them; nothing
can make them less our friends, and
If we have but grace to learn from
them, though the friends themselves
be taken, their souls will remain be-
hind to cheer us on.
They are the old friends who are
never seen with new faces, who are
the same in wealth and in poverty,
in glory and in obscurity."
The fact that there are books in the
world, books that hold the wisdom
and the experience of the past; that
there are books in the making
now that shall--we know not how
influence vitality the generations yet
to come, is but one more proof OF
the power OF God in the world. You
remember how this thought is ex.
pressed In Aurora Leigh
| read books bad and good-some bad
some good
At once good aims not always make
good books;
Well tempered spades turn UP ILL
smelling soils
In digging vineyards eyen) books, that
prove
Gods being so definitely, that mans
doubt
Grows self-defned the other side the
line,
Made atheist by suggestion; moral
books
disappearing to license; genial books,
Discounting from the human dignity;
And merry books, which set you weep
ing when
The sun shines-av, and melancholy
/ books,
Which make you laugh that anyone
/ should weep
In this disjointed life, for one wrong
/ more.
/ In this day and age when the old
/ saw of the making of new books
there is no end seems literally true
there are many things that pass for
! books that have only the outward
seeming. No book is worth anything
in its influence that is not worth a
great deal, and few are the books that
will prove of real value TO man UNI
less they are such that will bear
reading and re-reading until one
makes their contents part of himself
! Not that one needs to know it's lines
and passages by note, but if one is
to get good out of books ne must be
/ able to refer to their pages, as Rus
kin says, "as a soldier can seize the
weapon he needs in an armory."
Light reading. so-salled. is very OF