BOOKS THAT HAVE HINDERED ME.
So many grateful and impetuous spirits have recently come forward to tell to an approving world how they have been benefited by their early reading, and by their wisely chosen favorites in literature, that the trustful listener begins to think, against his own rueful experience, that all books must be pleasant and profitable companions. Those who have honored us with confidence in this matter seem to have found their letters, as Sir Thomas Browne found his religion, "all pure profit." Edward E. Hale, for instance, has been "helped" by every imaginable writer, from Marcus Aurelius to the amiable authoress of "The Wide, Wide World." Moncure D. Conway acknowledges his obligations to an infinite variety of sources. William T. Harris has been happy enough to seize instinctively upon those works which aroused his "latent energies to industry and self-activity;" and Edward Eggleston has gathered
