You are
FILLED WITH IDEAS NEW TO YOU,
and you derive great pleasure. Keep that book a year and read it over.
It is safe to say you will gain more benefit and reap greater enjoyment
from the second perusal than from the first. A library of books, every
one of which you have read, is a mine without "walls." It is a merry
assembly of old friends ever faithful. Grief cannot drive them away.
Slander cannot alienate them. They cannot have rival interests. They
cannot want anything you have got, and you can take all they have got,
AND NOT ROB THEM AT ALL.
You have a memory which is as treacherous as the most of the other
attributes of human nature. You sit down and read two hours on an
interesting topic. A friend opens the same subject to you, a day
afterward, in conversation, and you fairly carry him by storm. That is
unfair, for you should say you have been "posting up"--but it shows the
value of a library. By frequent "posting" on whatever you have read, you
become a learned man, which is
A TITLE OF GREAT CREDIT AND DIGNITY
in most men's eyes. The men who read once and "read everything" are
never called "learned.
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