"There are books, O Oom and Tante, other than the one great book which you took into the wilderness with you; books which so widen the soul of the man who makes them his that he might, when dying, well thank the power behind life that he had been made man, and lived to read them: but, do not believe that they are the products of any trade demand, or have any relation with the wealth and luxury of the modern world. Rich men may buy them and bind them in vellum, and put them in their libraries; but that gives them no hold upon them. In simplicity, and often in solitude and in poverty, the great souls of earth have secreted that immortal honey of thought on which the soul of humanity feeds. And whether it be the wisdom of the great Greek who lay in the Agora in his coarse mantle, instructing without pay the youth of Athens; or the vision of the Puritan Englishman which visited him in poverty, blindness, and old age; or the immortal dream of the Italian exile; or the deathless trill, sweeter than the song of his nightingales, of the young English apothecary who died in Rome; or the philosophy of the great German who lived for thirty years in a little house in the little street of a little German town, desiring no more; or the human cry from the heart of the Scotch ploughman; or the sweet musings of the modern American who communed with his God at Concord for many years--there is no message of beauty or wisdom which it has been given to the soul of men to propound for its fellows, for which luxury or material complexity of life were necessary. There is no message of wisdom which has ever been uttered which you may not as well absorb, seated on the kopje behind your square mud-house, as in the velvet armchair of a duke's palace, with lackeys waiting your commands and the spoils of the universe gathered round you. Two narrow shelves of dingily-bound books will contain more of the world's true intellectual pabulum than a man has time in sixty years to absorb and make his own; and he who at the door of his hut in the veld has spelt out the book of Job and the chants of Isaiah, till he knows them by heart, may have a firmer hold on the world's loftiest literature than if he had hired a librarian to tend his ten thousand costly volumes. Let no man deceive you, O Oom and Tante, nor make you believe that literature is a grand thing, only to be enjoyed by men eating several courses at dinner and dwelling in capacious houses, nor that it can only be produced by men who have consumed thousands of pounds of the world's labour. The world's literature has been produced in simplicity and in poverty, and often in suffering; and that which was good enough for the men who wrote, is good enough for the men who would absorb it. They lie, Tante, they lie, Oom, who tell you that literature is dependant on luxury, or the material complexity of life, for its existence, or is in any way related to it. It is from the barren heath, not from the drawing-room