letters. John Keats, apprenticed to an apothecary, read
Spenser's "Epithalamium" one golden afternoon in company with his
friend, Cowden Clarke, and from that hour was a poet by the grace of
God. In both cases the readers read with the imagination, or their own
natures would not have kindled with so sudden a flash. The torch is
passed on to those only whose hands are outstretched to receive it. To
read with the imagination, one must take time to let the figures
reform in his own mind; he must see them with great distinctness and
realise them with great definiteness. Benjamin Franklin tells us, in
that Autobiography which was one of our earliest and remains one of
our most genuine pieces of writing, that when he discovered his need
of a larger vocabulary he took some of the tales which he found in an
odd volume of the "Spectator" and turned them into verse; "and after a
time, when I had pretty well forgotten the prose, turned them back
again. I also sometimes jumbled my collections of hints into
confusion, and after some weeks endeavoured to reduce them into the
best order before I began to form the full sentences and compleat the
paper." Such a patient recasting of material for the ends of verbal
exactness and accuracy suggests ways in which the imagination may deal
with characters and scenes in order to stimulate and foster its own
activity. It is well to recall at frequent intervals the story we read
in some dramatist, poet, or novelist, in order that the imagination
may set it before us again in all its rich vitality. It is well also
as we read to insist on seeing the picture as well as the words. It is
as easy to see the bloodless duke before the portrait of "My Last
Duchess," in Browning's little masterpiece, to take in all the
accessories and carry away with us a vivid and lasting impression, as
it is to follow with the eye the succession of words. In this way we
possess the poem, and make it serve the ends of culture.

Chapter IV.

The First Delight.

"We were reading Plato's Apology in the Sixth Form," says Mr. Symonds
in his account of his school life at Harrow. "I bought Cary's crib,
and took it with me to London on an _exeat_ in March. My hostess,
a Mrs. Bain, who lived in Regent's Park, treated me to a comedy one
evening at the Haymarket. I forget what the play was. When we returned
from the play I went to bed and began to read my Cary's Plato. It so
happened that I stumbled on the 'Phaedrus.' I r