No, wealth is a blessing to us only when we say within ourselves, now that we need not work all the time to keep soul and body together, now that our body is sufficiently well served, go to, let us see what we can do for our soul. I am not preaching to-day, and I utter not a word about religion for the soul. But, apart from religion, what is there that you can do for your soul, that is, for your self, better worth doing than to feed it with thought, with reason, with emotion, with imagination? What does your release from drudgery signify to you, if it does not signify opportunity to live freely a life higher than the life of a brute? The good that science accomplishes for us is in itself an imperfect good. It is merely means to an end. We are defeated if we stop with the means. We must go on by the means to the end. Science is chiefly good as science makes way for literature. Let literature come in through the door that science opens. Make free and wide your mind to the expanding and ennobling influence of literature. Every time you read a great book, you grow. And growth is life, and life is power, and power is joy. Literary culture is a process of intellectual annexation. You read, and you annex province after province of thought and of experience to the realm that was yours before. There is no limit to this expansion of empire. It is not simply during the intervals while you are reading that you establish new currents of intellectual life within you. What you read remains a permanent possession. Do not say, No, my memory is poor, I can not retain what I read. But you do retain it—in effect. It has gone into the substance of your mind. Your mind is now of a different texture. Your horizon is extended. Before, you dwelt low in a valley shut in by narrowing hills. You saw only what was immediately around you. You have a higher point of outlook now. Your landscape is wider, more various. But there are yet higher heights to be won. Go on and up. What an inspiring thing it is to stand in the Alps, where there is nothing visible to overtop you but the sky itself! Toward such an experience, in the realm of mind, literature invites you. There is no exclusiveness, no monopoly here. You are all invited. Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton—these are not for one, or for a few, but for all. Socrates will talk with you, and Plato and Aristotle. Demosthenes will repeat his peerless eloquence for you, and Cicero, and Chatham, and Webster. It is a glorious fellowship. Here are Æschylus and Sophocles and Euripides, here are Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon, here are Horace and Juvenal, Livy and Tacitus. All ages and all races are yours. You may be wise with the wisdom of time. Who would be content to live his own individual life alone, when, to each one of us all it is open to live, as it were, the whole life of mankind? And this is the gift of literature.