iling pages a magazine of heroism and wisdom, all of an antique
strain; they will have their "linen decencies" and excited orthodoxies
fluttered, and will (if they have any gift of reading) perceive that
these have not been fluttered without some excuse and ground of reason;
and (again if they have any gift of reading) they will end by seeing
that this old gentleman was in a dozen ways a finer fellow, and held in
a dozen ways a nobler view of life, than they or their contemporaries.

The next book, in order of time, to influence me was the New Testament,
and in particular the Gospel according to St. Matthew. I believe it
would startle and move any one if they could make a certain effort of
imagination and read it freshly like a book, not droningly and dully
like a portion of the Bible. Any one would then be able to see in it
those truths which we are all courteously supposed to know and all
modestly refrain from applying. But upon this subject it is perhaps
better to be silent.

I come next to Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," a book of singular service,
a book which tumbled the world upside down for me, blew into space a
thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion, and, having thus
shaken my tabernacle of lies, set me back again upon a strong foundation
of all the original and manly virtues. But it is, once more, only a book
for those who have the gift of reading. I will be very frank--I believe
it is so with all good books, except, perhaps, fiction. The average man
lives, and must live, so wholly in convention, that gunpowder charges of
the truth are more apt to discompose than to invigorate his creed.
Either he cries out upon blasphemy and indecency, and crouches the
closer round that little idol of part-truths and part-conveniences which
is the contemporary deity, or he is convinced by what is new, forgets
what is old, and becomes truly blasphemous and indecent himself. New
truth is only useful to supplement the old; rough truth is only wanted
to expand, not to destroy, our civil and often elegant conventions. He
who cannot judge had better stick to fiction and the daily papers. There
he will get little harm, and, in the first at least, some good.

Close upon the back of my discovery of Whitman, I came under the
influence of Herbert Spencer. No more persuasive rabbi exists, and few
better. How much of his vast structure will bear the touch of time, how
much is clay and how much brass, it were too curious to inquire