Text-books supply methods, information, and discipline; teachers impart the breath of life by giving us inspiration and impulse.

Now, the great books are different from all other books in their possession of this mysterious vital force; they are not only text-books by reason of the knowledge they contain, but they are also books of life by reason of the disclosure of personality which they make.

The student of "Faust" receives from that drama not only the poet's interpretation of man's life in the world, but he is also brought under the spell of Goethe's personality, and, in a real sense, gets from his book that which his friends got from the man.
This is not true of secondary books; it is true only of first-hand books.

Secondary books are often products of skill, pieces of well-wrought but entirely self-conscious craftsmanship; first-hand books are always the expression of what is deepest, most original and distinctive in the nature which produces them.

In such books, therefore, we get not only the skill, the art, the knowledge; we get, above all, the man.