er the bare necessaries of life) in
taking it in, listening and tasting and looking in it, is one of the
seven wonders of the world. I never look out of my factory window in
civilisation, see a sunset or shore of the universe,--am reminded again
that there is a universe--but I wonder at myself and wonder at It. I try
to put civilisation and the universe together. I cannot do it. It's as
if we were afraid to be caught looking at it--most of us--spending the
time to look at it, or as if we were ashamed before the universe
itself--running furiously to and fro in it, lest it should look at us.

It is the first trait of a great book, it seems to me, that it makes all
other books--little hurrying, petulant books--wait. A kind of
immeasurable elemental hunger comes to a man out of it. Somehow I feel I
have not had it out with a great book if I have not faced other great
things with it. I want to face storms with it, hours of weariness and
miles of walking with it. It seems to ask me to. It seems to bring with
it something which makes me want to stop my mere reading-and-doing kind
of life, my ink-and-paper imitation kind of life, and come out and be a
companion with the silent shining, with the eternal going on of things.
It seems to be written in every writing that is worth a man's while that
it can not--that it shall not--be read by itself. It is written that a
man shall work to read, that he must win some great delight to do his
reading with. Many and many a winter day I have tramped with four lines
down to the edge of the night, to overtake my soul--to read four lines
with. I have faced a wind for hours--been bitterly cold with it--before
the utmost joy of the book I had lost would come back to me. I find that
when I am being normal (vacations mostly) I scarcely know what it is to
give myself over to another mind for more than an hour or so at a time.
If a chapter has anything in it, I want to do something with it, go out
and believe it, live with it, exercise it awhile. I am not only bored
with a book when it does not interest me. I am bored with it when it
does. I want to interrupt it, take it outdoors, see what the hills and
clouds think, try it on, test it, see if it is good enough--see if it
can come down upon me as rain or sunlight or other real things and blow
upon me as the wind. It does not belong to me until it has found its way
through all the weathers within and the weathers without, until it
drifts with me throu