"Shakespeare and the Bible," said John Sharp, "made me Archbishop of York." The "Vicar of Wakefield" awakened the poetical genius in Goethe.
"I have been the bosom friend of Leander and Romeo," said Lowell.

"I seem to go behind Shakespeare, and to get my intelligence at first hand.
Sometimes, in my sorrow, a line from Spenser steals in upon my memory as if by some vitality and external volition of its own, like a blast from the distant trump of a knight pricking toward the court of Faerie, and I am straightway lifted out of that sadness and shadow into the sunshine of a previous and long-agone experience." "Who gets more enjoyment out of eating," asks Amos R.Wells, "the pampered millionaire, whose tongue is the wearied host of myriads of sugary, creamy, spicy guests, or the little daughter of the laborer, trotting about all the morning with helpful steps, who has come a long two miles with her father's dinner to eat it with him from a tin pail?
And who gets the more pleasure out of reading, the satiated fiction-glutton, her brain crammed with disordered fragments of countless scenes of adventure, love and tragedy, impatient of the same old situations, the familiar characters, the stale plots--she or the girl who is fired with a love for history, say, who wants to know all about the grand old, queer old Socrates, and then about his friends, and then about the times in which he lived, and then about the way in which they all lived, then about the Socratic legacy to the ages?
Why, will that girl ever be done with the feast?
Can you not see, looking down on her joy with a blessing, the very Lord of the banquet, who has ordered all history and ordained that the truth He fashions shall be stranger always than the fiction man contrives?
Take the word of a man who has made full trial of both.

Solid reading is as much more interesting and attractive than frivolous reading as solid living is more recreative than frivolous living." "I solemnly declare," said Sidney Smith, "that but for the love of knowledge, I should consider the life of the meanest hedger and ditcher as preferable to that of the greatest and richest man in existence; for the fire of our minds is like the fires which the Persians burn in the mountains, it flames night and day, and is immortal, and not to be quenched! Upon something it must act and feed--upon the pure spirit of knowledge, or upon the foul dregs of polluting passions.

Therefore, when I say, in conducting your understanding, love knowledge with a great love, with a vehement love, with a love co-eval with life--what do I say but love innocence, love virtue, love purity of conduct, love that which, if you are rich and great, will vindicate the blind fortune which has made you so, and make men call it justice; love that which, if you are poor, will render your poverty respectable, and make the proudest feel it unjust to laugh at the meanness of your fortunes; love that which will comfort you, adorn you, and never quit you--which will open to you the kingdom of thought, and all the boundless regions of conception, as an asylum against the cruelty, the injustice, and the pain that may be your lot in the world--that which will make your motives habitually great and honorable, _and light up in an instant a thousand noble disdains at the very thought of meanness and of fraud_ ?" Do I feel like hearing an eloquent sermon?
Spurgeon and Beecher, Whitefield, Hall, Collyer, Phillips Brooks, Canon Farrar, Dr.Parker, Talmage, are all standing on my bookcase, waiting to give me their greatest efforts at a moment's notice.

Do I feel indisposed, and need a little recreation?
This afternoon I will take a trip across the Atlantic, flying against the wind and over breakers without fear of seasickness on the ocean greyhounds.