Alexandria Gazette

Reading.—When the business of the day is over, how many men does the evening hour find comfortably seated in their easy chairs, reading to themselves, or to some fair friend or happy group! In how many pleasant homes, while the ladies are seated at their morning employments, or amusements, or whatever else they may please to call them, does some glad creature read aloud, in a voice full of music, and marked by the sweetest emotion of a young pure heart, a lay of our mighty bards, or a story of one of our most cunning interweavers of the truth of nature with the splendor of fiction, or follow the wonderful recitals of our travellers, naturalists, and philosophical spirits, into every region of earth and mind! Publishers may tell us "poetry don't sell;" critics may cry "poetry is a drug," thereby making it so by the frivolous and unreflecting, who are the multitude: but we will venture to say, that at no period were there ever more books read by that part of our population most qualified to draw delight and good from reading; and when we enter mechanics' libraries, and see them filled with simple, quiet, earnest men, and find such men now sitting on stiles in the country, deeply sunk into the very marrow and spirit of a well-handled volume, where we used to meet them in riotous and reckless mischief, we are proud and happy to look forward to that wide and formerly waste field, over which literature is extending its triumphs, and to see the beneficent consequences that will follow to the whole community.—William Howitt.