gh moods, events, sensations, and days and nights,
faces and sunsets, and the light of stars,--until it is a part of life
itself. I find there is no other or shorter or easier way for me to do
with a great book than to greet it as it seems to ask to be greeted, as
if it were a world that had come to me and sought me out--wanted me to
live in it. Hundreds and hundreds of times, when I am being civilised,
have I not tried to do otherwise? Have I not stopped my poor pale,
hurried, busy soul (like a kind of spectre flying past me) before a
great book and tried to get it to speak to it, and it would not? It
requires a world--a great book does--as a kind of ticket of admission,
and what have I to do, when I am being civilised, with a world--the one
that's running still and godlike over me? Do I not for days and weeks at
a time go about in it, guilty, shut-in, and foolish under it, slinking
about--its emptied miracles all around me, mean, joyless, anxious,
unable to look the littlest flower in the face--unable----. "Ah, God!"
my soul cries out within me. Are not all these things mine? Do they not
belong with me and I with them? And I go racing about, making things up
in their presence, plodding for shadows, cutting out paper dolls to live
with. All the time this earnest, splendid, wasted heaven shining over
me--doing nothing with it, expecting nothing of it--a little more warmth
out of it perhaps, a little more light not to see in----. Who am I that
the grasses should whisper to me, that the winds should blow upon me?
Now and then there are days that come, when I see a flower--when I
really see a flower--and my soul cries out to it.

Now and then there are days too, when I see a great book, a book that
has the universe wrought in it. I find my soul feeling it vaguely,
creeping toward it. I wonder if I dare to read it. I remember how I used
to read it. I all but pray to it. I sit in my factory window and try
sometimes. But it is all far away--at least as long as I stay in my
window. It's all about some one else--a kind of splendid wistful walking
in a dream. It does not really belong to me to live in a great book--a
book with the universe in it. Sometimes it almost seems to. But it
barely, faintly belongs to me. It is as if the sky came to me, and
stooped down over me, and then went softly away in my sleep.

X

The Dead Level of Intelligence

Your hostess introduces you to a man in a drawing-room. "Mr. C----
belongs to a