音频下载[点击右键另存为][00:00.74]Passage 49 Book and Life

[00:04.90]Books are to mankind what memory is to the individual.

[00:09.82]They contain the history of our race, the discoveries we have made,

[00:14.31]the accumulated knowledge and experience of ages;

[00:18.57]they picture for us the miracles and beauties of nature, help us in our difficulties,

[00:25.25]comfort us in sorrow and in suffering, change hours of weariness into moments of delight,

[00:32.69]store our minds with ideas, fill them with good and happy thoughts,

[00:38.49]and lift us out of and above ourselves.

[00:42.43]Many of those who have had, as we say, all that this world can give,

[00:47.68]have yet told us they owed much of their purest happiness to books.

[00:53.04]Macaulay had wealth and fame, rank and power,

[00:57.85]and yet he tells us in his biography that he owed the happiest hours of his life to books.

[01:04.96]He says, “If any one would make me the greatest king that ever lived,

[01:10.66]with palaces and gardens and fine dinners, and wines and coaches, and beautiful clothes,

[01:17.33]and hundreds of servants, on condition that I should not read books,

[01:22.36]I would not be a king;

[01:24.44]I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who didn’t love reading.”

[01:31.99]Precious and priceless are the blessings which the books scatter around our daily paths.

[01:38.88]We walk, in imagination, with the noblest spirits,

[01:43.59]through the most solemn and charming regions.

[01:46.54]Without stirring from our firesides we may roam to the most remote regions of the earth,

[01:53.54]or soar into realms when Spenser's shapes of unearthly beauty flock to meet us,

[01:59.99]where Milton's angels peal in our ears the choral hymns of Paradise.

[02:05.80]Science, art, literature, philosophy,

[02:10.06]—all that man has thought, all that man has done,

[02:14.77]—the experience that has been bought with the sufferings of a hundred generations,

[02:19.80]—all are garnered up for us in the world of books.