Reading is, first of all, a means of recreation, like games or music or the drama or travel or any of the other amusements by which people forget their ordinary occupations and get out of the ruts of their ordinary thought and speech. The first test of literature, therefore, is its power to take us out of ourselves. While we read, we live in a world that is attractive through its strangeness, a world of fancy and imagination. The measure of the power of what we read lies in the completeness with which we are absorbed into this unaccustomed world. If you become thoroughly interested in the Indian stories of Fenimore Cooper, you are transported to the scenes in which the action moves; you are a companion to Natty Bumppo; he is as real to you as if you could actually see him and hear him speak. You can recall stories in which you became so absorbed that you did not hear if someone called you or spoke to you. You were not willing to lay aside the book until you had devoured the whole of it. Your book was like the magic carpet of old romance, powerful to carry you far off from your actual surroundings and into a world. where all manner of strange adventures awaited you.

This test of interest-deep, absorbing interest-is a fair one. It is met by all reading that once gets full influence over you. It may even be met, on occasion, by that which is not literature. For example, you may become greatly interested in wireless telegraphy. As a result of this interest, a book on the subject may seem, for the time, far more absorbing than any other reading that you

can find. You eagerly devour every scrap of information you can pick up on the subject. The fascination that literature can exert is akin to the fascination that the handbook on wireless telegraphy possesses, though it springs from different

causes.

It is not, primarily, the information that you gain from poetry and story and drama that marks the difference between what is literature and what is not. An encyclopedia or a dictionary or a treatise on history or science may give you far more useful information than you can get from this book or from any other book devoted to literature. Neither is it in the moral lessons or even in the ideals of conduct suggested that you find the chief reason for reading. Literature gives information and is filled with noble ideals, but its first use for you is to bring pleasure. This book, like every book filled with what we call literature as distinct from writing that seeks only to give information, is more than a series of lessons.

Suppose we look a little more closely at this distinction between what we call a "lesson" and that which we call a recreation or a source of pleasure. Some "lesson," for example, may be distasteful to you because you don't find it interesting. If you are conscientious, you can probably force yourself to learn it, but you take no pleasure in it, and you spend as little time on it as you can.

It doesn't take you out of yourself.

Literature, rightly used, possesses the power to take you out of yourself, to widen your horizon, to increase the range of your interests. The pleasures that are brought by any departure from our

usual way of living are of different kinds and values. Some of them are mere surrenders to easy and unworthy ideals. It is possible to increase the fineness of one's ideas about pleasure through the development of standards of taste. The man who has acquired such standards finds just as keen enjoyment in a bit of fine. music as someone else finds in mere noise, as much pleasure in a noble poem or picture as someone else finds in doggerel or a cheap print. To cultivate one's appreciation for pleasures that involve judg ment and standards of taste is no small part of the training that reading affords. These standards are not arbitrary or fixed by mere rules. They develop naturally in one who gives attention to the matter. In this part of your book, for example, you will find stories, some of them thrilling and dramatic, others humorous, which many people have agreed to call good stories. It isn't necessary to call them masterpieces and to differentiate between them and the stories in a popular magazine. The magazine may contain stories just as good; in fact, some of these very stories first appeared in the magazines of their time. The one thing for you to do is to do just what you do with your new magazine-read for enjoyment, without thinking of any lesson or anything to be learned, and then to apply just the same test that you apply to your magazine story, the test of whether it interests you or not. But when you have done this, you might ask yourself just why you like the story or do not like it. The notes and questions that follow the selection may help you to find this out; that is all they are for-not to supply you with tasks, but to help you to form your own standards by which to judge between that which is true and that which is false, between genuine representation of life and character and a sentimental or unreal imitation, between genuine humor and the cheap jest.

This done, you can use these standards, your own standards, not those that have been forced upon you, to apply to the new magazine. Perhaps you will read, in some magazine, one story that seems to you as effective and as interesting as one of those

you have used as a standard, while another you will see is cheap and unworthy. Always the test is of interest, of power to carry you out of yourself into an unfamiliar world, but you are to form your own standards of what is true and what is false, of the difference between what you feel that you have a right to enjoy and what you feel is unworthy of you.

The story is told of a famous artist who was once approached by an ignorant but conceited woman with the remark: "I don't know a thing in the world about art, but I know what I like and what I don't like." "Madam," gravely responded the artist, "so does a cow."

To get the utmost enjoyment out of your reading is therefore the first thing to look for. And part of this enjoyment springs from certain qualities that we bring to our reading, qualities of judgment, taste, and of right appreciation.

II

Books and reading, we have found, are an introduction to a world of adventure. This does not mean that they deal only with exciting events. So long as you do only the accustomed things, travel the same path every day, and every day see only the same things, your life has in it no adventure. Adventure is that which takes you out of yourself, gives you an unwonted experience. Such an experience may be encountered anywhere, at any time. In one of Shakespeare's plays, a nobleman, living in exile, speaks of the charm of his quiet life far from wars and courts, a life in which, he says, he

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,

Sermons in stones, and good in everything. Partly this was due to the fact that he was living in surroundings strange to him, far from "public haunt.' A peasant who had lived all his life there might not have found any adventure in the trees or brooks or stones. Adventure to such a man would be a ride on a train or in the subway or a sight of a great city from the top of a tall building. Adventure, once more, is that which takes you out of yourself.

This unwonted experience that we call

adventure may be a part of your real life or it may be a part of the life that you find in books. Shakespeare, whose dramas are a book-world in adventures in themselves, often speaks of this book-world and the real world in almost the same terms. "My library," one of his characters says, "was dukedom large enough." And Wordsworth speaks of books as a world in themselves:

Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,

Are a substantial world, both pure and good. Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,

Our pastime and our happiness will grow.

It is in this sense that you are now invited to enter the World of Adventure that is in books. For your introduction to this world, here are some good stories. But all your reading, in the later parts of this book, in other books-all your reading may be travels "in the realms of gold," to use the fine phrase by which Keats described his adventures in reading. In such reading, you are also living, for literature is but an expression of life. This expression must satisfy us by its beauty, interest us by the zest and spirit with which it portrays its world, and take us out of the beaten track of everyday existence into a world of adventure more precious than a dukedom.

III

An interesting series of essays appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1921-2 under the title "The Iron Man." By this term the author personifies, in a vivid phrase, the vast development of machinery. Work that was formerly done by human strength, if done at all, is now performed by machines of such power and dexterity that they seem almost human. With the further perfection of machinery, the time may come when the work of the world may be performed in only a part of the week. Even now, men have more leisure than in former times, and this margin between the hours of labor necessary for one to earn a living and one's free time is growing greater year by year.

All this brings sharply to mind the question of what we are to do with our

leisure when it is gained. To this there are many answers, some of them good and others evil. Just one aspect of the matter concerns us here. It is not merely a question of how you are to use your time for recreation, the time when there are no lessons to learn or work to be done, or even when your hour for skating or tennis or football has given way to the hour for reading. It is a matter that may be even more important to you forty years from now than it is today.

When that time comes, reading will be a source of keen enjoyment to you, or will mean nothing at all, just in proportion as you learn to read now. Learning to read is not just a matter of ability to pronounce and define words, or to understand a description of a fire or an account of a murder in the morning paper. The interest that the expression of thought may have for you is one that increases with exercise, like the interest you take in a game. The qualities of judgment, taste, and right appreciation that were spoken of a moment ago, qualities that add to your enjoyment of what you read, are also capable of development. With such habits of reading, formed easily now, you will find books a never-failing source of recreation, increasing in their power as the years go by.

You are reading for enjoyment now; you are laying up stores for enjoyment when you are old.

IV

There are two worlds of adventure, then: the world of experience and action, and the world of reading. Both of them enrich our lives at the time when we enter them; both of them increase in meaning as we go on through life; both are storehouses of memory upon which we can draw at will. This parallel between the action-world and the book-world has never been more beautifully expressed than by Keats in the poem to which reference was made a moment ago. He is speaking, in this poem, of the new world of delight that opened to him when he came upon Chapman's translation of Homer. No experience that he had had in the realms of gold, by which he meant this book-world, could compare with the adventure that came to

him when he stumbled upon Chapman's Homer:

Much have I traveled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer rules as his
demesne;

Yet never did I breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold;

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific-and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise-
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

You see at a glance how admirably this poem expresses the kinship between the book-world of adventure and the actionworld. Two supreme experiences are drawn upon by the poet in his effort to tell us what reading Homer meant to him. You can conceive of no more thrilling experience than to have stood with the great explorer who first of our race looked upon the broad expanse of the Pacific. The explorer was Balboa, not Cortez, but this error of Keats makes no essential difference. Men had thought that the new lands discovered as the result of Columbus's daring journey were a part of India. That an ocean greater than the Atlantic yet separated them

from the object of their search had not dawned upon them. To be the first of modern Europeans to come face to face with this stupendous fact, to have seen the narrow Mediterranean world expand to take in the vast Atlantic and then to find another mighty ocean stretching still farther to the west-what a thrilling adventure was this! It was to be compared only with the thrill that came to the astronomer in those days when Galileo's telescope was yet so new that the astronomer might hope to find with it a planet hitherto unknown. Like these adventures of the action-world, says the poet, was the experience that came to him when the riches of Homer's great poem were suddenly revealed. The world of Homer, known only through his book, was as real as the new-found planet or the mighty ocean. Each experience was unique, stupendous, an adventure without parallel.

No more oceans are to be discovered. Since Balboa's time the Pacific and all the seven seas have been measured and charted. Men have stood at the North Pole and at the South. The wonders of the heavens, too, have been explored. But to you, to every girl and boy, may yet come the delight which the poet classes with thesethe entrance, through reading, upon a world of adventure, the realms of gold over which Homer, and Stevenson, and Scott, and Shakespeare, and many others like them rule as kings.