little connected with life, either practical or
spiritual, and it is possible to act, to feel, and even to think and to
express one's self with propriety and grace, while having simply no
literature at all behind one. That this is really no paradox is proved
by pointing to the Greeks, who, even in the time of Plato--let alone the
time, whenever that was, of Homer--had not much more knowledge of books
than my Italian servant, who knows a few scraps of Tasso, possesses a
"Book of Dreams; or Key to the Lottery," and uses the literature I have
foolishly bestowed upon him as blotters in which to keep loose bills,
and wherein occasionally to do addition sums. So that the fact seems to
be that reading books is useful chiefly to enable us to wish to read
more books!

How many times does one not feel checked, when on the point of lending a
book to what we call uneducated persons, by wondering what earthly
texture of misapprehension and blanks they will weave out of its
allusions and suggestions? And the same is the case of children. What
fitter reading for a tall Greek goddess of ten than the tale of Cupid
and Psyche, the most perfect of fairy stories with us; wicked sisters,
subterranean adventures, ants helping to sort seeds, and terrible
awaking drops of hot oil spilt over the bridegroom? But when I read to
her this afternoon, shall I not see quite plainly over the edge of the
book, that all the things which make it just what it is to me--the
indescribable quality of the South, of antiquity and paganism--are
utterly missed out; and that, to this divine young nymph, "Cupid and
Psyche" is distinguishable from, say, "Beauty and the Beast" only by the
unnecessary addition of a lot of heathenish names and the words which
she does not even want to understand? Hence literature, alas! is, so to
speak, for the literate; and one has to have read a great, great deal in
order to taste the special exquisiteness of books, their marvellous
essence of long-stored up, oddly mixed, subtly selected and hundredfold
distilled suggestion.

But once this state of things reached, there is no need to read much;
and every reason for not _keeping up_, as vain and foolish persons
boast, "with literature." Since, the time has come, after planting and
grafting and dragging watering-pots, for flowering and fruition; for
books to do their best, to exert their full magic. This is the time when
a verse, imperfectly remembered, will haunt the memory; and one