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And thus our reading will be sadly one-sided, however voluminous it be,
if it entirely close to us any of the great types and ideals which the
creative instinct of man has produced, if it shut out from us either
the ancient world, or other European poetry, as important almost as our
own. When our reading, however deep, runs wholly into "pockets," and
exhausts itself in the literature of one age, one country, one type,
then we may be sure that it is tending to narrow or deform our minds.
And the more it leads us into curious byways and nurtures us into
indifference for the beaten highways of the world, the sooner we shall
end, if we be not specialists and students by profession, in ceasing to
treat our books as the companions and solace of our lifetime, and in
using them as the instruments of a refined sort of self-indulgence.
A wise education, and so judicious reading, should leave no great type
of thought, no dominant phase of human nature, wholly a blank. Whether
our reading be great or small, so far as it goes, it should be general.


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