To this necessity educators will some day open their eyes, and educational systems will some day conform; meantime, it must be done mainly by individual work.

Knowledge, discipline, and technical training of the best sort are accessible on every hand; but the development of the faculty which unites all these in the highest form of activity must be secured mainly by personal effort.

The richest and most accessible material for this highest education is furnished by art; and the form of art within reach of every civilised man, at all times, in all places, is the book.

To these masterpieces, which have been called the books of life, all men may turn with the assurance that as the supreme achievements of the imagination they have the power of awakening, stimulating, and enriching it in the highest degree.

For the genuine reader, who sees in a book what the writer has put there, repeats in a way the process through which the maker of the book passed.