晨读英语美文100篇 Passage 49 Book and Life
 音频下载[点击右键另存为][00:00.74]Passage 49 Book and Life[00:04.90]Books are to mankind what memory is to the individual. [00:09.82]They contain the history of our race, the discoveries we have made, [00:14.31]the accumulated knowledge and experience of ages; [00:18.57]they picture for us the miracles and beauties of nature, help us in our difficulties, [00:25.25]comfort us in sorrow and in suffering, change hours of weariness into moments of delight, [00:32.69]store our minds with ideas, fill them with good and happy thoughts, [00:38.49]and lift us out of and above ourselves. [00:42.43]Many of those who have had, as we say, all that this world can give, [00:47.68]have yet told us they owed much of their purest happiness to books. [00:53.04]Macaulay had wealth and fame, rank and power, [00:57.85]and yet he tells us in his biography that he owed the happiest hours of his life to books. [01:04.96]He says, “If any one would make me the greatest king that ever lived, [01:10.66]with palaces and gardens and fine dinners, and wines and coaches, and beautiful clothes, [01:17.33]and hundreds of servants, on condition that I should not read books, [01:22.36]I would not be a king; [01:24.44]I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who didn’t love reading.” [01:31.99]Precious and priceless are the blessings which the books scatter around our daily paths. [01:38.88]We walk, in imagination, with the noblest spirits, [01:43.59]through the most solemn and charming regions. [01:46.54]Without stirring from our firesides we may roam to the most remote regions of the earth, [01:53.54]or soar into realms when Spenser's shapes of unearthly beauty flock to meet us, [01:59.99]where Milton's angels peal in our ears the choral hymns of Paradise. [02:05.80]Science, art, literature, philosophy, [02:10.06]—all that man has thought, all that man has done, [02:14.77]—the experience that has been bought with the sufferings of a hundred generations, [02:19.80]—all are garnered up for us in the world of books. |
