direct life? Better,
perhaps, to read and read incessantly, losing one's futile self in the
activity of other minds.

This summer I have taken up no new book, but have renewed my acquaintance
with several old ones which I had not opened for many a year. One or two
have been books such as mature men rarely read at all--books which it is
one's habit to "take as read"; to presume sufficiently known to speak of,
but never to open. Thus, one day my hand fell upon the _Anabasis_, the
little Oxford edition which I used at school, with its boyish sign-manual
on the fly-leaf, its blots and underlinings and marginal scrawls. To my
shame I possess no other edition; yet this is a book one would like to
have in beautiful form. I opened it, I began to read--a ghost of boyhood
stirring in my heart--and from chapter to chapter was led on, until after
a few days I had read the whole.

I am glad this happened in the summer-time, I like to link childhood with
these latter days, and no better way could I have found than this return
to a school-book, which, even as a school-book, was my great delight.

By some trick of memory I always associate school-boy work on the
classics with a sense of warm and sunny days; rain and gloom and a chilly
atmosphere must have been far the more frequent conditions, but these
things are forgotten. My old Liddell and Scott still serves me, and if,
in opening it, I bend close enough to catch the _scent_ of the leaves, I
am back again at that day of boyhood (noted on the fly-leaf by the hand
of one long dead) when the book was new and I used it for the first time.
It was a day of summer, and perhaps there fell upon the unfamiliar page,
viewed with childish tremor, half apprehension and half delight, a mellow
sunshine, which was to linger for ever in my mind.

But I am thinking of the _Anabasis_. Were this the sole book existing in
Greek, it would be abundantly worth while to learn the language in order
to read it. The _Anabasis_ is an admirable work of art, unique in its
combination of concise and rapid narrative with colour and
picturesqueness. Herodotus wrote a prose epic, in which the author's
personality is ever before us. Xenophon, with curiosity and love of
adventure which mark him of the same race, but self-forgetful in the
pursuit of a new artistic virtue, created the historical romance. What a
world of wonders in this little book, all aglow with ambitions and
conflicts, with marvels of s