The Burden Of The Incommunicable.

Surely Everyone Is Aware Of The Divine Pleasures Which Attend A Wintry Fireside; Candles At Four O'clock, Warm Hearthrugs, Tea, A Fair Tea-maker, Shutters Closed, Curtains Flowing In Ample Draperies To The Floor, Whilst The Wind And Rain Are Raging Audibly Without.

A Great Scholar, In The Highest Sense Of The Term, Is Not One Who Depends Simply On An Infinite Memory, But Also On An Infinite And Electrical Power Of Combination; Bringing Together From The Four Winds, Like The Angel Of The Resurrection, What Else Were Dust From Dead Men's Bones, Into The Unity Of Breathing Life.

Many A Man Has Risen To Eminence Under The Powerful Reaction Of His Mind In Fierce Counter-agency To The Scorn Of The Unworthy, Daily Evoked By His Personal Defects, Who With A Handsome Person Would Have Sunk Into The Luxury Of A Careless Life Under The Tranquillizing Smiles Of Continual Admiration.

Books, We Are Told, Propose To Instruct Or To Amuse. Indeed! A True Antithesis To Knowledge, In This Case, Is Not Pleasure, But Power. All That Is Literature Seeks To Communicate Power; All That Is Not Literature, To Communicate Knowledge.

It Is One Of The Misfortunes In Life That One Must Read Thousands Of Books Only To Discover That One Need Not Have Read Them.