up.  I have related these unimportant details because that night was one of the most important nights of my life....  Here in the ‘Phaedrus’ and the ‘Symposium,’ in the ‘Myth of the Soul,’ I discovered the revelation I had been waiting for, the consecration of a long-cherished idealism.  It was just as though the voice of my own soul spoke to me through Plato.  Harrow vanished into unreality.  I had touched solid ground.  Here was the poetry, the philosophy of my own enthusiasm, expressed with all the magic of unrivalled style.”  The experience recorded in these words is typical; it comes to every one who has the capacity for the highest form of enjoyment and the highest kind of growth.  It was an experience which was both emotional and spiritual; delight and expansion were involved in it; the joy of contact with something beautiful, and the sudden enlargement which comes from touch with a great nature dealing with fundamental truth.  In every experience of this kind there comes an access of life, as if one had drunk at a fountain of vitality.

A thrilling chapter in the spiritual history of the race might be written by bringing together the reports of such experiences which are to be found in almost all literatures,—­experiences which vary greatly in depth and significance, which have in common the unfailing interest of discovery and growth.  If this collocation of vital contacts could be expanded so as to include the history of the intellectual commerce of races, we should be able to read the story of humanity in a new and searching light.  For the transmission of Greek thought and beauty to the Oriental world, the wide diffusion of Hebrew ideas of man and his life, the contact of the modern with the antique world in the Renaissance, for instance, effected changes in the spiritual constitution of man more subtle, pervasive, and radical than we are yet in a position to understand.  The spiritual history of men is largely a history of discovery,—­the record of those fruitful moments when we come upon new things, and our ideas are swiftly or slowly expanded to include them.  That process is generally both rapid and continuous; the discovery of this continent made an instant and striking impression on the older world, but that older world has not yet entirely adjusted itself to the changes in the social order which were to follow close upon the rising of the new world above the once mysterious line of the western horizon.

Now, this process of discovery goes on continuously in the experience of every human soul which has capacity for growth; and it is the peculiar joy of the lover of books.  Literature is a continual revelation to every genuine reader; a revelation of that quality which we call art, and a revelation of that mysterious vital force which we call life.  In this double disclosure literature shares with all art a function which ranges it with the greatest resources of the spirit; and the reader who has the trained vision