However much we may admire the orator's occasional bursts of eloquence,the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or above the fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind the clouds.There are the stars,and they who can may read them.The astronomers forever comment on and observe them.They are not exhalations like our daily colloquies and vaporous breath.What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study.The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion,and speaks to the mob before him,to those who can hear him;but the writer,whose more equable life is his occasion,and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator,speaks to the intellect and health of mankind,to all in any age who can understand him.
No wonder that Alexander carried the Iliad with him on his expeditions in a precious casket.A written word is the choicest of relics.It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art.It is the work of art nearest to life itself.It may be translated into every language,and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips;-not be represented on canvas or in marble only,but be carved out of the breath of life itself.The symbol of an ancient man's thought becomes a modern man's speech.Two thousand summers have imparted to the monuments of Grecian literature,as to her marbles,only a maturer golden and autumnal tint,for they have carried their own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect them against the corrosion of time.Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.Books,the oldest and the best,stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage.They have no cause of their own to plead,but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them.Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society,and,more than kings or emperors,exert an influence on mankind.When the illiterate and perhaps scornful trader has earned by enterprise and industry his coveted leisure and independence,and is admitted to the circles of wealth and fashion,he turns inevitably at last to those still higher but yet inaccessible circles of intellect and genius,and is sensible only of the imperfection of his culture and the vanity and insufficiency of all his riches,and further proves his good sense by the pains which he takes to secure for his children that intellectual culture whose want he so keenly feels;and thus it is that he becomes the founder of a family.
Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they were written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the history of the human race;for it is remarkable that no tran of them has ever been made into any modern tongue,unless our civilization itself may be regarded as such a tran.Homer has never yet been printed in English,nor Aeschylus,nor Virgil even,-works as refined,as solidly done,and as beautiful almost as the morning itself;for later writers,say what we will of their genius,have rarely,if ever,equalled the elaborate beauty and finish and the lifelong and heroic literary labors of the ancients.They only talk of forgetting them who never knew them.It will be soon enough to forget them when we have the learning and the genius which will enable us to attend to and appreciate them.That age will be rich indeed when those relics which we call Classics,and the still older and more than classic but even less known Scriptures of the nations,shall have still further accumulated,when the Vaticans shall be filled with Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles,with Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares,and all the centuries to come shall have successively deposited their trophies in the forum of the world.By such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last.
The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind,for only great poets can read them.They have only been read as the multitude read the stars,at most astrologically,not astronomically.Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience,as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade;but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing;yet this only is reading,in a high sense,not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while,but what we have to stand on tip-top to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to.
