And in this preliminary article I would like to enforce as strongly as words can express it my conviction that knowledge and culture should be set apart widely. In the reading that I shall recommend, culture of the mind and the heart comes first of all. This is more valuable than rubies, a great possession that glorifies life and opens our eyes to beauties in the human soul, as well as in nature, to all of which we were once blind and dumb. And culture can be built on the bare rudiments of education, at which pedagogues and pedants will sneer. Some of the most truly cultured men and women I have ever known have been self-educated; but their minds were opened to all good books by their passion for beauty in every form and their desire to improve their minds. Among the scores of letters that have come to me in my bereavement and that have helped to save me from bitterness, was one from a woman in a country town of California. After expressing her sympathy, greater than she could voice in words, she thanked me warmly for what I had said about the good old books. Then she told of her husband, the well-known captain of an army transport, who went to sea from the rugged Maine coast when a lad of twelve, with only scanty education, and who, in all the years that followed on many seas, laboriously educated himself and read the best books. In his cabin, she said, were well-worn copies of Shakespeare, Gibbon, Thackeray, Dickens, Burns, and others. These great worthies he had made a part of himself by constant reading. Of course, the man who thinks that the full flower of education is the ability to "parse" a sentence, or to express a commonplace thought in grandiloquent language that will force his reader to consult a dictionary for the meaning of unusual words--such a man and pedant would look upon this old sea captain as uneducated. But for real culture of mind and soul give me the man who has had many solitary hours for thought, with nothing but the stars to look down on him; who has felt the immensity of sea and sky, with no land and no sail to break the fearful circle set upon the face of the great deep.