lly, with a magnificent play of power
across it, with an heroic imagination or power of putting together. He
turns everything that comes to him over into its place and force and
meaning in everything else. He reads slowly and organically where others
read with their eyes. He knows what it is to tingle with a book, to
blush and turn pale with it, to read his feet cold. He reads all over,
with his nerves and senses, with his mind and heart. He reads through
the whole tract of his digestive and assimilative nature. To borrow the
Hebrew figure, he reads with his bowels. Instead of reading to maintain
a theory, or a row of facts, he reads to sustain a certain state of
being. The man who has the knack, as some people seem to think it, of
making everything he reads and sees beautiful or vigorous and practical,
does not need to try to do it. He does it because he has a habit of
putting himself in a certain state of being and cannot help doing it. He
does not need to spend a great deal of time in reading for results. He
produces his own results. The less athletic reader, the smaller poet or
scientist, confines himself to reading for results, for ready-made
beauty and ready-made facts, because he is not in condition to do
anything else. The greater poet or scientist is an energy, a
transfigurer, a transmuter of everything into beauty and truth.
Everything having passed through the heat and light of his own being is
fused and seen where it belongs, where God placed it when He made it, in
some relation to everything else.

I fear that I may have come, in bearing down on this point, to another
of the of-course places in this book. It is not just to assume that
because people are not living with a truth that they need to be told it.
It is of little use, when a man has used his truth all up boring people
with it, to try to get them (what is left of the truth and the people)
to do anything about it. But if I may be allowed one page more I would
like to say in the present epidemic of educating for results, just what
a practical education may be said to be.

The indications are that the more a man spends, makes himself able to
spend, a large part of his time, as Whitman did, in standing still and
looking around and loving things, the more practical he is. Even if a
man's life were to serve as a mere guide-board to the universe, it would
supply to all who know him the main thing the universe seems to be
without. But a man who, like Walt