Card —Victorian book quote inside

Inside: "It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds, and these invaluable means of communication are within the reach of all. In the best books great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours… They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are the true levelers. They give to all, who will faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence of the best and greatest of our race. No matter how poor I am,—no matter though the prosperous of my own time will not enter my obscure dwelling,—if sacred writers will enter and take up their abode under my roof,—if Milton will cross my threshold and sing to me of Paradise, and Shakespeare to open to me the worlds of imagination and the workings of the human heart, and Franklin to enrich me with his practical wisdom, I shall not pine for want of intellectual companionship, and I may become a cultivated man, though excluded from what is called the best society in the place where I live." —Channing, 1883.