say, but entirely indiscreet in what they write.  The only books which possess a real and abiding vitality are those in which personality is freely and frankly revealed.  Of course there are one or two authors like Shakespeare who seem to have had a power of penetrating and getting inside any personality, but, apart from them, the books that go on being read and re-read are the books in which one seems to clasp hands with a human soul.

I said many of these things to my friend, and he replied that he thought I was probably right, but that he could not change his opinion.  He would not have had these letters published until all the survivors were dead.  He did not think that the people who liked the book were actuated by good motives, but had merely a desire to penetrate behind the due and decent privacies of life; and he would have stopped the publication of such letters if he could, because even if people liked them, it was not good for them to read them.  He said that he himself felt on reading the book as if he had been listening at keyholes, or peeping in at windows, and seeing the natural endearments of husband and wife, mother and children.

I said that what seemed to me to make a difference was whether the people thus espied were conscious of the espionage or not; and that it was no more improper to have such things revealed in A book, than to have them described in a novel or shown upon the stage.  Moreover, it seemed to me, I said, as though to reveal such things in a book was the perfect compromise.  I feel strongly that each home, each circle has a right to its own privacy; but I am not ashamed of my natural feelings and affections, and, by allowing them to appear in a book, I feel that I am just speaking of them simply to those who will understand.  I desire communion with all sympathetic and like-minded persons; but one’s actual circle of friends is limited by time and space and physical conditions.  People talk of books as if every one in the world was compelled to read them.  My own idea of a book is that it provides a medium by which one may commune confidentially with people whom one may never see, but whom one is glad to know to be alive.  One can make friends through one’s books with people with whom one agrees in spirit, but whose bodily presence, modes of life, reticences, habits, would erect a barrier to social intercourse.  It is so much easier to love and understand people through their books than through their conversation.  In books they put down their best, truest, most deliberate thoughts; in talk, they are at the mercy of a thousand accidents and sensations.  There were people who objected to the publication of the Browning love-letters.  To me they were the sacred and beautiful record of an intensely holy and passionate relation between two great souls; and I can afford to disregard and to contemn the people who thought the book strained, unconventional and shameless, for the sake of those whose faith in love and beauty was richly and generously nurtured by it.