PREFACE. "THE most notable quality of such books is their suggestiveness. They bring their thought and give it to us, not as men bring their treasures to a warehouse, laying them down there upon the floor as on a foreign, unrelated substance, but as you bring the spark of fire to a pile of wood which has within itself the power of burning and turning into fire. It is not the fulness of their hands which makes them welcome: it is the delicacy and discrimination of the finger which they lay upon some spring in us and set some of our nature free. Some suggestive word out of this book will fall upon a score of lives some morning, and will touch the key of each. Each will be better for it, but how differently! One will do better trading; another will do better teaching; another's household life will be more pure and lofty. The fire falls upon a hundred |