Books are delightful when prosperity happily smiles; when adversity threatens, they are inseparable comforters. They give strength to human compacts, nor are grave opinions brought forward without books. Arts and sciences, the benefits of which no mind can calculate, depend upon books. j. RICHARD AUNGERVYLE (Richard De Bury)-Philobiblon.

You, O Books, are the golden vessels of the temple, the arms of the clerical militia with which the missiles of the most wicked are destroyed; fruitful olives, vines of Engaddi, fig-trees knowing no sterility; burning lamps to be ever held in the hand.

k. RICHARD AUNGERVYLE (Richard De Bury)-Philobiblon.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

1. BACON-Essay. Of Studies.

The images of men's wits and knowledges remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time, and capable of perpetual renovation. m. BACON Advancement of Learning. Bk. I. Advantages of Learning.

They are true friends, that will neither flatter nor dissemble: be you but true to yourself, applying that which they teach unto the party grieved, and you shall need no other comfort nor counsel.

Books, books, books!

Books.

I found the secret of a garret-room
Piled high with cases in my father's name;
Piled high, packed large,-where, creeping
in and out

Among the giant fossils of my past,

Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs

Of a mastadon, I nibbled here and there
At this or that box, pulling through the gap,
In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy,
The first book first. And how I felt it beat
Under my pillow, in the morning's dark,
An hour before the sun would let me read!
My books!

At last, because the time was ripe,
I chanced upon the poets.

r. E. B. BROWNING-Aurora Leigh.
Bk. I. Line 830.
We get no good

By being ungenerous, even to a book,
And calculating profits--so much help
By so much reading. It is rather when
We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge
Soul-forward, headlong, into a book's pro-
found,

Impassioned for its beauty, and salt of truth