of rhetoric for their profoundest experiences,—­namely, to waste away and die.  When a man can read, his paroxysm of feeling is passing.  When he can read, his thought has slackened its hold.—­You talk about reading Shakspeare, using him as an expression for the highest intellect, and you wonder that any common person should be so presumptuous as to suppose his thought can rise above the text which lies before him.  But think a moment.  A child’s reading of Shakspeare is one thing, and Coleridge’s or Schlegel’s reading of him is another.  The saturation-point of each mind differs from that of every other.  But I think it is as true for the small mind which can only take up a little as for the great one which takes up much, that the suggested trains of thought and feeling ought always to rise above—­not the author, but the reader’s mental version of the author, whoever he may be.

I think most readers of Shakspeare sometimes find themselves thrown into exalted mental conditions like those produced by music.  Then they may drop the book, to pass at once into the region of thought without words.  We may happen to be very dull folks, you and I, and probably are, unless there is some particular reason to suppose the contrary.  But we get glimpses now and then of a sphere of spiritual possibilities, where we, dull as we are now, may sail in vast circles round the largest compass of earthly intelligences.

——­I confess there are times when I feel like the friend I mentioned to you some time ago,—­I hate the very sight of a book.  Sometimes it becomes almost a physical necessity to talk out what is in the mind, before putting anything else into it.  It is very bad to have thoughts and feelings, which were meant to come out in talk, strike in, as they say of some complaints that ought to show outwardly.

I always believed in life rather than in books.  I suppose every day of earth, with its hundred thousand deaths and something more of births,—­with its loves and hates, its triumphs and defeats, its pangs and blisses, has more of humanity in it than all the books that were ever written, put together.  I believe the flowers growing at this moment send up more fragrance to heaven than was ever exhaled from all the essences ever distilled.

——­Don’t I read up various matters to talk about at this table or elsewhere?—­No, that is the last thing I would do.  I will tell you my rule.  Talk about those subjects you have had long in your mind, and listen to what others say about subjects you have studied but recently.  Knowledge and timber shouldn’t be much used till they are seasoned.