only will bear to be read many times, but that
of which the true value can only be gained by frequent, and indeed
habitual reading. A man can hardly be said to know the twelfth Mass or
the ninth Symphony, by virtue of having once heard them played ten
years ago; he can hardly be said to take air and exercise because he
took a country walk once last autumn. And so he can hardly be said to
know Scott, or Shakespeare, Moliere, or Cervantes, when he once read
them since the close of his school-days, or amidst the daily grind of
his professional life. The immortal and universal poets of our race
are to be read and reread till their music and their spirit are a part
of our nature; they are to be thought over and digested till we live
in the world they created for us; they are to be read devoutly, as
devout men read their Bibles and fortify their hearts with psalms. For
as the old Hebrew singer heard the heavens declare the glory of their
Maker, and the firmament showing his handiwork, so in the long roll of
poetry we see transfigured the strength and beauty of humanity, the
dignity and struggles, the long life-history of our common kind....

In an age of steam it seems almost idle to speak of Dante, the most
profound, the most meditative, the most prophetic of all poets, in
whose epic the panorama of medieval life, of feudalism at its best and
Christianity at its best, stands, as in a microcosm, transfigured,
judged, and measured. To most men, the "Paradise Lost," with all its
mighty music and its idyllic pictures of human nature, of our
first-child parents in their naked purity and their awakening thought,
is a serious and ungrateful task--not to be ranked with the simple
enjoyments; it is a possession to be acquired only by habit. The great
religious poets, the imaginative teachers of the heart, are never easy
reading. But the reading of them is a religious habit, rather than an
intellectual effort. I pretend not now to be dealing with a matter so
deep and high as religion, or indeed with education in the fuller
sense. I will say nothing of that side of reading which is really hard
study, an effort of duty, matter of meditation and reverential
thought.

JOHN RICHARD GREEN

Born in Oxford in 1837, died in 1883; graduated from Oxford
in 1860; a curate in London in 1860; incumbent of St.
Philip's, Stepney, in 1866; librarian at Lambeth in 1869;
published his "Short History of the English People" i