a creak on the stair may startle us,—­but we do not go to bed.  We reach out our hand for some favorite volume, Stevenson’s Garden of Verses, Underwoods, or Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights:  and read far on into the night towards cock-crow.  We mingle our reading with dreams, and read on and on, finding a new feeling in our book:  we find the author’s deeper meaning.  Our reading is undisturbed by the ghost-creep of childhood and the adventuresome daring of boarding-school.  Formerly we had the mere tale or story; now we feel in a small degree the soul-expression of the writer—­an indefinable, will-o’-the-wisp sort of thing; a something not always caught, but that strange intangible something which lends the spark of immortality to the master creations.

Literary Monthly, 1909.