CONSIDER what you have in the smallest chosen
library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men
that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand
years, have set in best order the results of their
learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and
inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruptions, fenced by
etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to
their bosom friend is here written out in transparent
words to us, the strangers of another age. — Ralph
Waldo Emerson.
