seeds, digging in the ground for sunsets; and everywhere through all the
world, the whole huddling, crowding mob of those who read, hastening on
its endless paper-paved streets, from the pyramids of Egypt and the
gates of Greece, to Pater Noster Row and the Old Corner Book
Store--nearly all of them trying to make the wrong connections with the
right things or the right connections with things they have no
connection with, and only now and then a straggler lagging behind
perhaps, at some left-over bookstall, who truly knows how to read, or
some beautiful, over-grown child let loose in a library--making
connections for himself, who knows the uttermost joy of a book.

In seeking for a fundamental principle to proceed upon in the reading of
books, it seems only reasonable to assert that the printed universe is
governed by the same laws as the real one. If a child is to have his
senses about him--his five reading senses--he must learn them in exactly
the way he learns his five living senses. The most significant fact
about the way a child learns the five senses he has to live with is,
that no one can teach them to him. We do not even try to. There are
still--thanks to a most merciful Heaven--five things left in the poor,
experimented-on, battered, modern child, that a board of education
cannot get at. For the first few months of his life, at least, it is
generally conceded, the modern infant has his education--that is, his
making connection with things--entirely in his own hands. That he learns
more these first few months of his life when his education is in his own
hands, than he learns in all the later days when he is surrounded by
those who hope they are teaching him something, it may not be fair to
say; but while it cannot be said that he learns more perhaps, what he
does learn, he learns better, and more scientifically, than he is ever
allowed to learn with ordinary parents and ordinary teachers and
text-books in the years that come afterward. With most of us, this first
year or so, we are obliged to confess, was the chance of our lives. Some
of us have lived long enough to suspect that if we have ever really
learned anything at all we must have learned it then.

The whole problem of bringing to pass in others and of maintaining in
ourselves a vital and beautiful relation to the world of books, turns
entirely upon such success as we may have in calling back or keeping up
in our attitude toward books, the attitude of t