The Book-lover's Enchiridion

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Simpkin, Marshall & Company, 1884 - Books and reading - 492 pages

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Page 121 - Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast, Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round, And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn Throws up a steamy column, and the cups, That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each, So let us welcome peaceful evening in.
Page 122 - Tis pleasant, through the loopholes of retreat, To peep at such a world ; to see the stir Of the great Babel, and not feel the crowd ; To hear the roar she sends through all her gates At a safe distance, where the dying sound Falls a soft murmur on the uninjured ear.
Page 165 - I must confess that I dedicate no inconsiderable portion of my time to other people's thoughts. I dream away my life in others' speculations. I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading ; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me.
Page 193 - It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds, and these invaluable means of communication are in the reach of all. In the best books great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.
Page 28 - STUDIES serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight is in privateness and retiring ; for ornament, is in discourse ; and for ability, is in the judgment and disposition of business. For expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one ; but the general counsels, and the plots, and marshalling of affairs come best from those that are learned.
Page 153 - Dreams, books, are each a world ; and books, we know, Are a substantial world, both pure and good : Bound these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, Our pastime and our happiness will grow.
Page 282 - ... men began to hunt more after words than matter ; and more after the choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgment.
Page 310 - Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passage. As soon as he has done this, that line will be quoted east and west.
Page 116 - Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.
Page 64 - For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are ; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.

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