ought. 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.

--I confess there are times when I feel like the friend I mentioned
to you some time ago,--I hate the very sight of a book. Sometimes
it becomes almost a physical necessity to talk out what is in the
mind, before putting anything else into it. It is very bad to have
thoug