If he is of those who talk about "this age of shams," "this age without
ideals," "this hysterical age," and this heaven-knows-what-age--

Then that man, though he reads undisputed classics for twenty hours
a day, though he has a memory of steel, though he rivals Porson
in scholarship and Sainte Beuve in judgment, is not receiving from
literature what literature has to give. Indeed, he is chiefly wasting
his time. Unless he can read differently, it were better for him if
he sold all his books, gave to the poor, and played croquet. He fails
because he has not assimilated into his existence the vital essences
which genius put into the books that have merely passed before his
eyes; because genius has offered him faith, courage, vision, noble
passion, curiosity, love, a thirst for beauty, and he has not taken
the gift; because genius has offered him the chance of living fully,
and he is only half alive, for it is only in the stress of fine ideas
and emotions that a man may be truly said to live. This is not a moral
invention, but a simple fact, which will be attested by all who know
what that stress is.

What! You talk learnedly about Shakespeare's sonnets! Have you heard
Shakespeare's terrific shout:

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy.

And yet, can you see the sun over the viaduct at Loughborough Junction
of a morning, and catch its rays in the Thames off Dewar's whisky
monument, and not shake with the joy of life? If so, you and
Shakespeare are not yet in communication. What! You pride yourself on
your beautiful edition of Casaubon's translation of _Marcus Aurelius_,
and you savour the cadences of the famous:

This day I shall have to do with an idle, curious man, with an
unthankful man, a railer, a crafty, false, or an envious
man. All these ill qualities have happened unto him, through
ignorance of that which is truly good and truly bad. But I
that understand the nature of that which is good, that it only
is to be desired, and of that which is bad, that it only
is truly odious and shameful: who know, moreover, that this
transgressor, whosoever he be, is my kinsman, not by the same
blood and seed, but by participation of the same reason and of
the same divine particle--how can I be hurt?...

And with these cadences in your ea