of their heads as soon as they can; as Jowett wrote of his pupil Swinburne, that he was a clever fellow, and would do well enough as soon as he had got rid of all this poetry and nonsense.  I feel no doubt that these ideas, this kind of interest in life, in the wonder and strangeness of it, can be pursued by many who do not pursue it.  It is like the white deer, which in the old stories the huntsman was for ever pursuing in the forest; he did not ever catch it, but the pursuit of it brought him many high adventures.

Of course it is far easier if one has a friend who shares the same tastes; but if one has not, there are always books, in which the best minds can be found thinking and talking at their finest and liveliest.  But here again a good many people are betrayed by reading books as one may collect stamps, just triumphing in the number and variety of the repertory.  I believe very little in setting the foot on books, as sailors take possession of an unknown isle.  One must make experiments, just to see what are the kind of books which nurture and sustain one; and then I believe in arriving at a circle of books, which one really knows through and through, and reads at all times and in all moods, till they get soaked and enriched with all sorts of moods and associations.  I have a dozen such, which I read and mark and scribble in, write when and where I read them, and who were my companions.  Of course the same books do not always last through one’s course.  You grow out of books as you grow out of clothes; and I sometimes look at old favourites, and find myself lost in wonder as to how I can ever have cared for them like that!  They seem now like little antechambers and corridors, through which I have passed to something far more noble and gracious.  But all the time we must be trying to weave the books really into life, not let them stand like ornaments on a shelf.  It is poetry that enkindles the mind most to dwell in the thoughts of which I have been speaking.  But it must not be read straight on; it must rather be tasted, brooded over, repeated, learned by heart.  Let me take a personal instance.  As a boy I had no opinion of Wordsworth, except that I admired one or two of the great poems like the “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality” and the “Ode to Duty,” which no one who sets out to love poetry at all can afford to ignore.  Then, as I grew older, I began to see that quotations from Wordsworth had a sort of grandeur in their very substance, which was unlike any other grandeur.  And then I took the whole of the poems away for a vacation, and worked at them; and then I found how again and again Wordsworth touches a thought to life, which is like the little objects you pick up on the seashore, the evidence of another life close at hand, indubitably there, and yet unknown, which is being lived under the waste of waters.  When Wordsworth says such things as

     And many love me, but by none
       Am I enough beloved,