e to us, the most important experience that men have
had in this world since they began on it, is that they are infinite,
that they cannot be expressed on it. It is not infrequently said that
men must get themselves expressed in living, but the fact remains that
no one has ever heard of a man as yet who really did it, or who was
small enough to do it. There was One who seemed to express Himself by
living and by dying both, but if He had any more than succeeded in
beginning to express Himself, no one would have believed that He was the
Son of God,--even that He was the Son of Man. It was because He could
not crowd all that He was into thirty-three short years and twelve
disciples and one Garden of Gethsemane and one Cross that we know who He
was.

Riveted down to its little place with iron circumstance, the actual self
in every man depends upon the larger possible self for the something
that makes the actual self worth while. It is hard to be held down by
circumstance, but it would be harder to be contented there, to live
without those intimations of our diviner birth that come to us in
books--books that weave some of the glory we have missed in our actual
lives, into the glory of our thoughts. Even if life be to the uttermost
the doing of what are called practical things, it is only by the
occasional use of his imagination in reading or otherwise, that the
practical man can hope to be in physical or mental condition to do them.
He needs a rest from his actual self. A man cannot even be practical
without this imaginary or larger self. Unless he can work off his
unexpressed remnant, his limbs are not free. Even down to the meanest of
us, we are incurably larger than anything we can do.

Reading a book is a game a man plays with his own infinity.

VI

Outward Bound

If there could only be arranged some mystical place over the edge of
human existence, where we all could go and practise at living, have
full-dress rehearsals of our parts, before we are hustled in front of
the footlights in our very swaddling clothes, how many people are there
who have reached what are fabulously called years of discretion, who
would not believe in such a place, and who would not gladly go back to
it and spend most of the rest of their lives there?

This is one of the things that the world of books is for. Most of us
would hardly know what to do without it, the world of books, if only as
a place to make mistakes and to feel foolish in