What I wanted to say about books is this:  that there are times in which every active mind feels itself above any and all human books.

—­I think a man must have a good opinion of himself, Sir,—­said the divinity-student,—­who should feel himself above Shakspeare at any time.

My young friend,—­I replied,—­the man who is never conscious of a state of feeling or of intellectual effort entirely beyond expression by any form of words whatsoever is a mere creature of language.  I can hardly believe there are any such men.  Why, think for a moment of the power of music.  The nerves that make us alive to it spread out (so the Professor tells me) in the most sensitive region of the marrow just where it is widening to run upwards into the hemispheres.  It has its seat in the region of sense rather than of thought.  Yet it produces a continuous and, as it were, logical sequence of emotional and intellectual changes; but how different from trains of thought proper! how entirely beyond the reach of symbols!—­Think of human passions as compared with all phrases!  Did you ever hear of a man’s growing lean by the reading of “Romeo and Juliet,” or blowing his brains out because Desdemona was maligned?  There are a good many symbols, even, that are more expressive than words.  I remember a young wife who had to part with her husband for a time.  She did not write a mournful poem; indeed, she was a silent person, and perhaps hardly said a word about it; but she quietly turned of a deep orange color with jaundice.  A great many people in this world have but one form 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.