American College Libraries [pp. 714-723]

AMIERICAN COLLEGE LIBRARIES.
dent views or of original inquiry. Every department of natural
science deserves an alcove of books, and a museum of specimens.
It is not necessary to plead here that American colleges
be supplied with the means of classical instruction, or of linguistic
inquiry; for these claims have been always allowed; and in these
departments, college shelves are most likely to be creditably furnished. What may be most needed is the addition of the new
to the old.
Money is often wasted in libraries in the purchase of inferior
literature. Why should any be bought or read, except the best?
Considered as a means of education the perusal of inferior authors is worse than waste. Those who fixed the curriculum of
classical study, chose the noblest models. They set us to reading Yirgil and Cicero, Livy and Tacitus. They selected for us extracts from Homer, Herodotus, Xenophon and Thucydides; from
the greatest tragedians and orators, critics and philosophers. They
have not given us the Augustan history because it is interesting;
Callimachus, or the Greek novelists, because they are attractive.
Nothing but the best, was the principle of their selection. And
why should we read a hundred volumes of British poets, many
of them insipid as lymph, instead of fixing our attention on the
ten who deserve it? The misfortune of youthful indiscriminate
reading is not only that it wastes time, but enfeebles the taste.
Until there are professorships of poetry and history, of criticism
and oratory, let librarians keep the door against all but the
highest and strongest writers.
But there ought to be these professorships of literature. Why
not, as well as of science? What nobler lessons can be learned at
college than those which history, for instance, is inspired to
teach? History is a book of charts by which statesmen sail;
hle who does not study it may steer his country upon rocks.
There ought to be lectures on the age of Lord Bacon, lighting
up the twilight of Tudor misrule, and helping us better to know
why our fathers came here. There ought to be professorshl-ips
of Shakespearean literature, charged to set forth the grandeur
of his philosophy, the subtle gradations of his comparative
psychology, and the strong simplicity of his phrase. There
ought to be lectures on the prose works of Milton teaching
from them the principles of political science, and biinging young
men acquainted with his indignant eloquence. To mnost men,
Milton is only a poet whom they must read once in their lives.
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