“You grov’ling worldlings, you whose wisdom trades
     Where light ne’er shot his golden ray.”

By dint of able writing and pen-craft, books are cunningly compiled, and have their run and success even among the learned, as if they were the result of a new man’s thinking, and their birth were attended with some natural throes.  But in a little while their covers fall off, for no binding will avail, and it appears that they are not Books or Bibles at all.  There are new and patented inventions in this shape, purporting to be for the elevation of the race, which many a pure scholar and genius who has learned to read is for a moment deceived by, and finds himself reading a horse-rake, or spinning-jenny, or wooden nutmeg, or oak-leaf cigar, or steam-power press, or kitchen range, perchance, when he was seeking serene and biblical truths.

                          “Merchants, arise,
     And mingle conscience with your merchandise.”

Paper is cheap, and authors need not now erase one book before they write another.  Instead of cultivating the earth for wheat and potatoes, they cultivate literature, and fill a place in the Republic of Letters.  Or they would fain write for fame merely, as others actually raise crops of grain to be distilled into brandy.  Books are for the most part wilfully and hastily written, as parts of a system, to supply a want real or imagined.  Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk.  They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.

    “To Athens gowned he goes, and from that school
     Returns unsped, a more instructed fool.”

They teach the elements really of ignorance, not of knowledge, for, to speak deliberately and in view of the highest truths, it is not easy to distinguish elementary knowledge.  There is a chasm between knowledge and ignorance which the arches of science can never span.  A book should contain pure discoveries, glimpses of terra firma, though by shipwrecked mariners, and not the art of navigation by those who have never been out of sight of land. They must not yield wheat and potatoes, but must themselves be the unconstrained and natural harvest of their author’s lives.

    “What I have learned is mine; I’ve had my thought,
     And me the Muses noble truths have taught.”

We do not learn much from learned books, but from true, sincere, human books, from frank and honest biographies.  The life of a good man will hardly improve us more than the life of a freebooter, for the inevitable laws appear as plainly in the infringement as in the observance, and our lives are sustained by a nearly equal expense of virtue of some kind.  The decaying tree, while yet it lives, demands sun, wind, and rain no less than the green one.  It secretes sap and performs the functions of health.  If we choose, we may study the alburnum only.  The gnarled stump has as tender a bud as the sapling.