possibility of his being
stunned by a book--made unconscious by it,--the professional critic of
the lesser sort would never say anything of interest to us at all, and
even if he did, being a maimed and defective conscious person, the
evidence that he was stunned is likely to be of more significance than
anything he may say about the book that stunned him, or about the way he
felt when he was being stunned. Having had very little practice in being
unconscious, the bare fact is all that he can remember about it. The
unconsciousness of a person who has long lost the habit of
unconsciousness is apt to be a kind of groping stupor or deadness at its
best, and not, as with the artist, a state of being, a way of being
incalculably alive, and of letting in infinite life. It is a small joy
that is not unconscious. The man who knows he is reading when he has a
book in his hands, does not know very much about books.

People who always know what time it is, who always know exactly where
they are, and exactly how they look, have it not in their power to read
a great book. The book that comes to the reader as a great book is
always one that shares with him the infinite and the eternal in himself.

There is a time to know what time it is, and there is a time not to, and
there are many places small enough to know where they are. The book that
knows what time it is, in every sentence, will always be read by the
clock, but the great book, the book with infinite vistas in it, shall
not be read by men with a rim of time around it. The place of it is
unmeasured, and there is no sound that men can make which shall tick in
that place.

III

The Organic Principle of Inspiration

Letting one's self go is but a half-principle, however, to do one's
reading with. The other half consists in getting one's self together
again. In proportion as we truly appreciate what we read, we find
ourselves playing; at being Boswell to a book and being Johnson to it by
turns. The vital reader lets himself go and collects himself as the work
before him demands. There are some books, where it is necessary to let
one's self go from beginning to end. There are others where a man may
sit as he sits at a play, being himself between acts, or at proper
intervals when the author lets down the curtain, and being translated
the rest of the time.

Our richest moods are those in which, as we look back upon them, we seem
to have been impressing, impressionable, creativ