LIFE ENRICHED

Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 May 1939, Page 5

LIFE ENRICHED

ACCESS TO GOOD LIBRARY. “My mind goes back more than fifty years to the time when I. was a boy in Birmingham,” said Dr Barnes, Bishop of Birmingham, at the opening of a new public library in that city. “Life was largely made up of family affection, narrow means, school reached through drab streets and hard work. Suddenly I discovered books, and the existence of a public library from which any number of exchanting books could be borrowed. Life was at once enriched, a new world came into being, a world more real than that of every day. At first I was intoxicated by boys’ books; such authors as Henty, Manville Fenn, Captain Marryatt, Mayne Reid, held me in thrall. My own boys wouldn’t favour any of those favourite writers of my childhood. Then came widened understanding and sympathies. Scott’s ‘Kenilworth’ and •Woodstock’ brought back the' romance of the 16th and 17th centuries associated with places I had visited; and then ■Vanity Fair’ showed me how strange and spacious was the world of the Whig aristocracy. And from George. Eliot's ‘Mill on the Floss’ and ‘Silas Marner’ I valued increasingly, as understanding grew, the sober, solid worth and strength of the common people of Central England. And all this enlargement —and the books 1 have mentioned are, as it were, but samples —came while I was a boy at school. True, I might have found some of the books at home, although books were not then too plentiful in small houses when there were a number of boys to be fed and clothed. But it was the library which gave me the opportunity of, as it were, browsing among books. From it I got much pleasure and an education richer and more stimulating than I could ever have obtained by the mere acquisition of knowledge. Books continue, and will continue. to make children heirs of English culture; and an equally valuable heritage they can acquire in no other way. Let us take pride in our libraries. Let us maintain and extend them.”