ged side by side and exactly where they are put, but which
no one had put there.

It would be hard to think of any intellectual or spiritual habit more
likely to give a man a bi-sexual or at least a cross-fertilising mind,
than the habit of masterful, wilful, elemental, desultory reading. The
amount of desultory reading a mind can do, and do triumphantly, may be
said to be perhaps the supreme test of the actual energy of the mind, of
the vital heat in it, of its melting-down power, its power of melting
everything through, and blending everything in, to the great central
essence of life.

No more adequate plan, or, as the architects call it, no better
elevation for a man could possibly be found than a daily newspaper of
the higher type. For scope, points of view, topics, directions of
interest, catholicity, many-sidedness, world-wideness, for all the raw
material a large and powerful man must needs be made out of, nothing
could possibly excel a daily newspaper. Plenty of smaller artists have
been made in the world and will be made again in it--hothouse or parlour
artists--men whose work has very little floor-space in it, one- or
two-story men, and there is no denying that they have their place, but
there never has been yet, and there never will be, I venture to say, a
noble or colossal artist or artist of the first rank who shall not have
as many stories in him as a daily newspaper. The immortal is the
universal in a man looming up. If the modern critic who is looking about
in this world of ours for the great artist would look where the small
ones are afraid to go, he would stand a fair chance of finding what he
is looking for. If one were to look about for a general plan, a rough
draft or sketch of the mind of an Immortal, he will find that mind
spread out before him in the interests and passions, the giant sorrows
and delights of his morning paper.

I am not coming out in this chapter to defend morning papers. One might
as well pop up in one's place on this globe, wherever one is on it, and
say a good word for sunrises. What immediately interests me in this
connection is the point that if a man reads for principles in this world
he will have time and take time to be interested in a great many things
in it. The point seems to be that there is nothing too great or too
small for a human brain to carry away with it, if it will have a place
to put it. All one has to do, to get the good of a man, a newspaper, a
book, or a