it
was because they made him see the most facts, helped him to feel and act
on facts, made facts experiences to him, that William Shakespeare became
so supreme and masterful with facts and men both.

To learn how to be _pro tem_. all kinds of men, about all things, to
enjoy their joys in the things, is the greatest and the livest way of
learning the things.

To learn to be a Committee of the Temperaments all by one's self (which
is what Shakespeare did) is at once the method and the end of
education--outside of one's specialty.

There could be no better method of doing this (no method open to
everybody) than the method,--outside of one's specialty,--of reading for
persons and with persons. It makes all one's life a series of spiritual
revelations. It is like having regular habits of being born again, of
having new experiences at will. It mobilises all love and passion and
delight in the world and sends it flowing past one's door.

In this day of immeasurable exercises, why does not some one put in a
word for the good old-fashioned exercise of being born again? It is an
exercise which few men seem to believe in, not even once in a lifetime,
but it is easily the best all-around drill for living, and even for
reading, that can be arranged. And it is not a very difficult exercise
if one knows how, does it regularly enough. It is not at all necessary
to go off to another world to believe in reincarnations, if one
practises on them every day. Women have always seemed to be more
generally in the way of being born again than men, but they have less
scope and sometimes there is a certain feverish smallness about it, and
when men once get started (like Robert Browning in distinction from Mrs.
Browning) they make the method of being born again seem a great
triumphant one. They seem to have a larger repertoire to be born to, and
they go through it more rapidly and justly. At the same time it is true
that nearly all women are more or less familiar with the exercise of
being born again--living _pro tem_. and at will--in others, and only a
few men do it--merely the greatest ones, statesmen, diplomats, editors,
poets, great financiers, and other prophets--all men who live by seeing
more than others have time for. They are found to do their seeing rather
easily on the whole. They do it by the perfectly normal exercise of
being born into other men, looking out of their eyes a minute, whenever
they like. All great power in its first s