If I were to pray for a taste which should stand me in stead under every variety of circumstances, and be a source of happiness and cheerfulness to me through life, and a shield against its ills, however things might go amiss, and the world frown upon me, it would be a taste for reading. I speak of it of course only as a worldly advantage, and not in the slightest degree as superseding or derogating from the higher office and surer and stronger panoply of religious principles--but as a taste, an instrument and a mode of pleasurable gratification. Give a man this taste, and the means of gratifying it, and you can hardly fail of making a happy man, unless, indeed, you put into his hands a most perverse selection of books. You place him in contact with the best society in every period of history--with the wisest, the wittiest--with the tenderest, the bravest, and the purest characters who have adorned humanity. You make him a denizen of all nations--a contemporary of all ages. The world has been created for him.--SIR J. HERSCHEL. _Address to the Subscribers to the Windsor Public Library._ MORE THAN MEAT, DRINK, AND CLOTHING I should like you to see the additional book-room that we have fitted up, and in which I am now writing.... It would please you to see such a display of literary wealth, which is at once the pride of my eye, and the joy of my heart, and the food of my mind; indeed, more than metaphorically, meat, drink, and clothing for me and mine. I verily believe that no one in my station was ever so rich before, and I am very sure that no one in any station had ever a more thorough enjoyment of riches of any kind, or in any way. It is more delightful for me to live with books than with men, even with all the relish that I have for such society as is worth having.--R. SOUTHEY (Letter to G. C. Bedford). THE BOOK THE HIGHEST DELIGHT