e, the change is more difficult to bear;
yet even here the general state of mind, the legal state of mind, is not
interfered with. But now suppose a reader perfectly absorbed in his
author, an author belonging very likely to another age and another
civilization entirely different from ours. Suppose that you are reading
the Defence of Socrates in Plato, and have the whole scene before you as
in a picture: the tribunal of the Five Hundred, the pure Greek
architecture, the interested Athenian public, the odious Melitus, the
envious enemies, the beloved and grieving friends whose names are dear
to us, and immortal; and in the centre you see one figure draped like a
poor man, in cheap and common cloth, that he wears winter and summer,
with a face plain to downright ugliness, but an air of such genuine
courage and self-possession that no acting could imitate it; and you
hear the firm voice saying--

[Greek: Timatai d' oun moi haner thanatou
Eien.][3]

You are just beginning the splendid paragraph where Socrates condemns
himself to maintenance in the Prytaneum, and if you can only be safe
from interruption till it is finished, you will have one of those
minutes of noble pleasure which are the rewards of intellectual toil.
But if you are reading in the daytime in a house where there are women
and children, or where people can fasten upon you for pottering details
of business, you may be sure that you will _not_ be able to get to the
end of the passage without in some way or other being rudely awakened
from your dream, and suddenly brought back into the common world. The
loss intellectually is greater than any one who had not suffered from it
could imagine. People think that an interruption is merely the unhooking
of an electric chain, and that the current will flow, when the chain is
hooked on again, just as it did before. To the intellectual and
imaginative student an interruption is not that; it is the destruction
of a picture.

LETTER IV.

TO A STUDENT WHO FELT HURRIED AND DRIVEN.

People who like to be hurried--Sluggish temperaments gain vivacity
under pressure--Routine work may be done at increased speed--The
higher intellectual work cannot be done hurriedly--The art of avoiding
hurry consists in Selection--How it was practised by a good landscape
painter--Selection in reading and writing--Some studies allow the play
of selection more than others do--Languages permit it less than
natural sciences