the shrill, high notes and the tremendous bases.

Then there is the re-reading that accuses the reader of another kind of
change--a twist to the right or the left, a cast in the mental eye, or
perhaps the correction of such a cast. The doctrines in some book seemed
strange to you once--almost abhorrent; you are ready to accept them now.
Is it because you then saw through a glass darkly and now more clearly? Or
is your vision darker now than it was? Your rereading apprizes you that
there has been a change of some sort. Perhaps you must await corroborative
testimony before you decide what its nature has been. Possibly you read
today without a blush what your mind of twenty years ago would have been
shocked to meet. Are you broader-minded or just hardened? These questions
are disquieting, but the disturbance that they cause is wholesome, and I
know of no way in which they can be raised in more uncompromising form
than by re-reading an old favorite, by bringing the alterable fabric of
your living, growing and changing mind into contact with the stiff,
unyielding yardstick of an unchangeable mental record--the cast of one
phase of a master mind that once was but has passed on.

Here I can not help saying a word of a kind of re-reading that is not the
perusal of literature at all with most of us--the re-reading of our own
words, written down in previous years--old letters, old lectures,
articles--books, perhaps, if we chance to be authors. Of little value,
perhaps, to others, these are of the greatest interest to ourselves
because instead of measuring our minds by an outside standard they enable
us to set side by side two phases of our own life--the ego of 1892,
perhaps, and that of 1914. How boyish that other ego was; how it jumped to
conclusions; how ignorant it was and how self-confident! And yet, how
fresh it was; how quickly responsive to new impressions; how unspoiled;
how aspiring! If you want to know the changes that have transformed the
mind that was into the very different one that now is, read your own old
letters.

I have tried to show you that pure literature is an art and like other
arts depends primarily upon manner and only secondarily upon matter. That
the artist, who in this case is the author, uses his power to influence
the reader usually through his emotions or feelings and that its effects
to a notable extent, are not marred by repetition. That on this account
all good literature may be re-read over and