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"Nowhere so happy as curled up in a corner with a book." So said, or is reputed to have said, no less a genius than St. Thomas à Kempis. And thousands of men and women, boys and girls, still testify to the truth and power of that saying. For of all friends or companions a book is the most reliable—often quite as helpful as any Jonathan to any David. For instance, what could have given Abraham Lincoln more lasting help than those early volumes which he so hungrily devoured over and over again? "Æsop's Fables," "Robinson Crusoe," "Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography," "The Pilgrim's Progress" absorbed every moment he could spare from his chores and his sleep. Not mere knowledge, but inspiration entered his soul from those oft-read pages; in them he gleaned visions of life, its strain and anguish, its exaltation and thrill; there, too, he caught the secret of that quaint faculty for terse anecdote by which he was to win his way not only to the heads but to the hearts of the hardy, courageous folk of the Middle West, and, later, those of the East as well. It was through this power to read and understand and enjoy that Lincoln learned to penetrate to the very soul of mankind, the deep recesses of the thoughts and feelings of his fellow men.

The will to try, the simple decision to make the effort, is all that is needed in order to grasp what an infinite fund of amusement and delight lies stored away in books. No unusual imaginative powers are requisite to get us on horseback with Dumas's swashbuckling, duelling musketeers, or to place us beside Poe's heroes in their dread predicaments. What friend or acquaintance can tell you half the tales of hair-breadth escape, side-splitting dilemma, or tender romance, such as scores of the cleverest writers have spent their lives in devising? These same writers have left this world, they can never more be seen or heard on earth; but the very essence of their talent and their personality, their brightest, most sparkling thoughts and ideas remain, and may readily be placed within reach of your own hand. Charles Dickens can never again voyage over the Atlantic and stroll across Boston Common in velvet coat and plaid waistcoat, gesticulating with eyes a-twinkle. But his Mr. Pickwick's adventure with the Middle-Aged Lady in Yellow Curl-Papers still remains, and the echo of Pickwick's "Bless my soul, what a dreadful thing" will ring in our ears forever, and forever stir a quiet chuckle. Rudyard Kipling is growing old, and his pen no longer flourishes with the reckless vivacity of the days when he was little more than a "cub" reporter and wrote "Mandalay." Yet that same "Mandalay" of the "old Moulmein pagoda" and the "tinkly temple bells" will rouse a thrill of romance and adventure in thousands of hearts that are still to be born. Poor Stevenson coughed his life away at Samoa, after a plucky fight for life that led him to France, 'Frisco, and the South Seas. None the less, though he has gone from us, the pictures of hope and courage that leap and laugh at us from his pages are as vivid to-day as when they first brought their new joy to the delighted world. Read once more that dainty sketch—that etching rather—"A Night among the Pines," and see for yourself how that great master of words has voiced our modern appreciation of the great outdoors. For each great author is an individual, no two of them are alike, any more than you are like your next-door neighbor. Their modes of expression, their joy in life are as varied and divergent as life itself. There is, moreover, nothing commonplace about them, their work is strong and fresh. Each has his tale to tell, his song to sing, his meditations to entrust to us, his own special message to the spirit or to the intellect of many a generation and many a race.

In other words, all great authors are artists, makers or shapers of truth and beauty, just as much and in the same measure as are painters and sculptors. Indeed, Literature is the chief of the Fine Arts. Music, with all its grandeur and charm, is but sound, and dies away; Painting, though never so rich in color and striking in form, is passive and for the most part devoid of action, and sad to say, very few of us have wealth enough to own even one canvas by a master; Sculpture, with all its dignity and grace, is cold and cheerless in the main; and Architecture is too bulky and ponderous to stir personal appreciation at a moment's notice.

In fact, Literature, and Literature alone, possesses the power of meeting our every mood and desire, for comfort, for excitement, for exaltation, for pathos, for laughter.

Literature alone can dwell within the walls of the humblest cabin, even in the squatter's camp in Labrador or Borneo. Raphael's glorious paintings may only be visited at the expense of months of time and hundreds of dollars; Beethoven's symphonies can only be presented by the most finished orchestras in a few of our largest cities; the statues wrought by Phidias and Rodin cannot be reproduced by the thousand and spread broadcast over our nation; Rheims Cathedral and her sister marvels must stand where first they rose, nor may they be successfully imitated. But, thank Heaven, Shakespeare, Dickens, Longfellow for a few cents send their messages to every soul on earth that can read English.

All of us are acquainted with some half dozen of the immortal writers of the world, but how many of them have we never met, perhaps have never heard of. If we could only obtain an introduction to them; if we only knew which writers and which of their works to select, all would be well. The most brilliant, the most lovable, the most sincere, the most thoughtful authors would gather round us and talk to us; they would bring their very best to entertain and delight us; they would offer us their guidance and companionship into every field of thought. Emerson's calm reflective tones reveal the answers to many of life's most pressing and significant problems; Swift, in "Gulliver's Travels," jestingly, yet bitterly, strips mankind of its pride and conceit, and lays bare the greed and selfishness that have ruined not individuals alone, but whole nations and empires; Lewis Carroll talks the most laughable, clever nonsense that ever inspired a humorist's pen; Burns, in the simplest of language, voices the pathos and tragedy of every life, even the humblest, and with our own Lincoln proves again and again that true nobility may dwell and flourish in the midst of poverty.

Truly, herein lies one of life's chief joys, in encountering what others have thought and achieved—in meeting the actors in the great world drama, the scenes in which they played their parts, the deeds by which they have won fame and fortune; still more delectable is the pleasure of whiling away leisure hours with those folk who are but products of the fancy, children of the poet's brain, dreams of the teller of tales: Odysseus, who, for the last three thousand years, as Sir Philip Sidney has put it, "held children from play and old men from the chimney corner"; Falstaff, chuckling at the comical ease with which he hoodwinks all about him; Lady Macbeth, who, even in her dreams, may not forget the dread stain upon her little hand; Faust, ever seeking to rid himself of his demon accomplice; the knights of King Arthur's round table, Robin Hood and his merry men, Dickens's troop of immortal grotesques, Bret Harte's rough miners, with their hearts of gold, Irving's droll New Yorkers of the Knickerbocker era, Longfellow's Blacksmith and his Evangeline—these and a host of other undying notables have made life far richer for us all.

Ours is the fault if we do not avail ourselves of their magic. For here in America the special opportunity to mingle with them lies readier to the hand than in any other nation. Nowhere else, not in England, nor France, nor in Italy can the everyday man find books at his command for the asking. In a few of the largest European cities, and not anywhere else on that continent, there are libraries of size and worth, yet even these are hedged about with a hundred rules and regulations that hamper circulation. But here, through the length and breadth of this glorious land, are thousands and yet more thousands of free libraries, containing all manner of books, of every age and nation, awaiting your demand. They contain all that is splendid in the way of printed matter, but also much, alas, that is not worth any man's time; so that though the best lies open and free to us, it is mingled with a vast amount of wretched trash.

Here lies the chief difficulty for us Americans: How are we to distinguish the chaff from the wheat, the weeds from the harvest? The task is that of seeking the proverbial needle in the haystack. We are deluged with printed matter, tons upon tons of books and magazines are poured daily upon the bookseller's counters. What is our chance of choosing the treasures from out this hodgepodge?

To meet this very problem these volumes have been prepared; it is hardly our place to dwell upon the years of labor and thought in which they have gradually taken shape, but it is perhaps to the point to remark that they represent the patient effort of many judges and critics to supply an introduction and a guide to the best and most inspiring literature of the nations from the beginning of the art to the present day—a means of recreation, amusement, and lasting profit.

In the past three thousand years, some four hundred authors have achieved such fame and standing as to distinguish them from the endless multitudes of commonplace penmen. To choose and present their very best work in complete, unified selections has constituted the fundamental purpose of these twelve volumes. In them, it is certain, an amazingly large proportion of the finest literature has been brought together; they form a boundless source of entertainment and a wellnigh infinite field for intellectual diversion and development.

By means of brief and suggestive biographical sketches, together with the Index and the Handbook, to serve as a guide to fuller enjoyment and appreciation, the editors have sought to amplify and enhance the value of the selective feature of the work. And through an abundance of illustrations, many of them painstaking reproductions of water color paintings of the homes and favorite haunts of the chief writers, additional understanding and pleasure is afforded.

The whole of this work has been built on the central idea of entertainment that shall be simple and unified. Every effort has been made to shun the elaborate, intricate methods that prevail so wastefully to-day in our educational and our recreational systems. At last educators are openly admitting that the only sane means of raising our standards of education must lie in simplifying the quantity of the studies so as to attain higher quality. In school and out of it, Johnny and his sister Molly will unquestionably profit by simple, straightforward teaching, play, reading, thinking. The more complex a game is, the fewer people can enjoy it or appreciate its fine points; the more involved a school system, the fewer children will be able to acquire thorough training. But simple games and simple instruction will enable all of us and of our little ones to get the habit of thoroughness and stability. These twelve volumes, then, are all constructed upon this principle of furnishing enjoyment in a simple, clean-cut manner; they constitute one of the most straightforward, clear, and forceful means toward the advance of our civilization.

The measure of a successful life is surely the amount of happiness, of true lasting pleasure which it has contained and which it has passed on to others. We do not count our years in terms of sorrow or vexation; we do not recall again and again our moments of failure or folly; only the bright and golden hours remain fast emblazoned in our memories, those days of sunshine and delight, when beauty and laughter sang in our hearts and the air was filled with music. Of all such days, those on which the friendly pages of some treasured author were first opened, or those when we reveled in the companionship of our favorite heroes of romance and adventure—those days indeed are among the brightest of all. The greater the number of red-letter days of such wonder and rapture, the greater the value of our lives, not only to ourselves, but to all who have shared them. In work and in play, at home and abroad, our undoubted ideal is that of finding perpetual joy in life. The Fountain of Youth, which Ponce de Leon vainly sought, is the quest of us all—we no longer seek to lengthen our lives, but instead we strive with might and main to fill them to the very brim with joyous thoughts and deeds. To be happy is to be forever young.