certainly rather be headlong--a mere heedless, superficial globe-trotter
with one's mind, than not to have any mind--to be wiped out at one's
breakfast table, to be soaked up into infinity every morning, to be
drawn off, evaporated into all knowledge, to begin one's day scattered
around the edges of all the world. One would do almost anything to avoid
this. And it is what always happens if one reads for principles
pell-mell.

All that I am claiming for reading for principles is, that if one reads
for principles, one really cannot miss it in reading. There is always
something there, and a man who treats a newspaper as if it were not good
enough for him falls short of himself.

The same is true of desultory reading so-called, of the habit of general
information, and of the habit of going about noticing things--noticing
things over one's shoulder.

I am inclined to think that desultory reading is as good if not better
for a man than any other reading he can do, if he organises it--has
habitual principles and swift channels of thought to pour it into. I do
not think it is at all unlikely from such peeps as we common mortals get
into the minds of men of genius, that their desultory reading (in the
fine strenuous sense) has been the making of them. The intensely
suggestive habit of thought, the prehensile power in a mind, the power
of grasping wide-apart facts and impressions, of putting them into
prompt handfuls, where anything can be done with them that one likes,
could not possibly be cultivated to better advantage than by the
practice of masterful and regular desultory reading.

Certainly the one compelling trait in a work of genius, whether in
music, painting, or literature, the trait of untraceableness, the
semi-miraculous look, the feeling things give us sometimes, in a great
work of art, of being at once impossible together, and inevitable
together,--has its most natural background in what would seem at first
probably, to most minds, incidental or accidental habits of observation.

One always knows a work of art of the second rank by the fact that one
can place one's hand on big blocks of material in it almost everywhere,
material which has been taken bodily and moved over from certain places.
And one always knows a work of art of the first rank by the fact that it
is absolutely defiant and elusive. There is a sense of infinity--a
gathered-from-everywhere sense in it--of things which belong and have
always belon