them, and Cowper and Thomson, and perhaps (a very large perhaps) Wordsworth. If you do not like poetry, which I suppose you do, the best way to learn is to write some.
Now I do not suppose that you will read all these books in a short time, or perhaps at any time, and some of them very probably you have read. I only wanted to fulfil your command, and speak a good word for some valued acquaintance of mine. The best of all ways to make one's reading valuable is to write about it, and so I hope my Cousin Elizabeth has a blank-book where she keeps some record of her thoughts. And if you think my letter very long, why you must bear in mind that once I was a schoolmaster, and I am so proud of my new scholar as to keep her long at my lecture.
Make my respectful remembrances to your mother and father and my compliments to your sister.
Your affectionate cousin, R. W. EMERSON.
Of himself he wrote in 1859: "I am a natural reader and only a writer in the absence of natural writers. In a true time I should never have written."
In his Phi Beta Kappa Address (in Nature, Addresses and Lectures) Mr. Emerson pointed out to the American Scholar the right and the wrong use of books and said, "Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times." Only in the intervals of direct illumination he may resort to their reflected light. And in "Nominalist and Realist" (Essays, Second Series) he admits that sometimes he reads even Plato "for the lustres," "for a mechanical help to the fancy and the imagination." He told a youthful writer "only to read to start his team." But in his
