eads oftenest, the
favorite passages that he loves, that he scans fondly with his eye while
yet he can repeat them by heart, his standards of admission to his inner
circle--all is peculiarly and personally his own. There is no other
precisely like it, just as there is no other human being precisely like
its owner. There is as much difference between this kind of a library and
some that we have seen as there is between a live, breathing creature with
a mind and emotions and aspirations, and a wax figure in the Eden Musee.

Thus every book lover re-reads his favorites in a way of his own, just as
every individual human being loves or hates or mourns or rejoices in a way
of his own.

One can no more describe these idiosyncrasies than he can write a history
of all the individuals in the world, but perhaps, in the manner of the
ethnological or zoological classifier, it may interest us to glance at the
types of a few genera or species.

And first, please note that re-reading is the exact repetition of a dual
mental experience, so far at least as one of the minds is concerned. It is
a replica of mind-contact, under conditions obtainable nowhere else in
this world and of such nature that some of them seem almost to partake of
other-worldliness. My yesterday's interview with Smith or Jones, trivial
as it is, I can not repeat. Smith can not remember what he said, and even
if he could, he could not say it to me in the same way and to the same
purpose. But my interview with Plato--with Shakespeare, with Emerson; my
talk with Julius Caesar, with Goethe, with Lincoln! I can duplicate it
once, twice, a hundred times. My own mind--one party to the contact--may
change, but Plato's or Lincoln's is ever the same; they speak no "various
language" like Byrant's nature, but are like that great Author of Nature
who has taken them to Himself, in that in them "is no variableness,
neither shadow of turning." To realize that these men may speak to me
today, across the abyss of time, and that I can count on the same message
tomorrow, next year and on my death bed, in the same authentic words,
producing the same effect, assures me that somewhere, somehow, a miracle
has been wrought.

I have said that one of the minds that come thus into contact changes not,
while the other, the reader's, is alterable. This gives him a sort of
standard by which he can measure or at least estimate, the changes that go
on within him, the temporary ones due to fluct