takes
down the book, reads it and what follows, judiciously breaking off,
one's mind full of the flavour and scent. Or, again, talking with a
friend, a certain passage of prose--the account of the Lambs going to
the play when young, or the beginning of "Urn Burial," or a chapter
(with due improvised skippings) of "Candide"--comes up in conversation;
and one reads it rejoicing with one's friends, feeling the special
rapture of united comprehension, of mind touching mind, like the little
thrill of voice touching voice on the resolving sevenths of the old
duets in thirds. Or even when, remembering some graver page--say the
dedication of "Faust" to Goethe's dead contemporaries--one fetches the
book and reaches it silently to the other one, not daring to read it out
loud.... It is when these things happen that one is really getting the
good of books; and that one feels that there really is something
astonishing and mysterious in words taken out of the dictionary and
arranged with commas and semicolons and full stops between them.

The greatest pleasures of reading consist in re-reading. Sometimes
almost in not reading at all, but just thinking or feeling what there
is inside the book, or what has come out of it, long ago, and passed
into one's mind or heart, as the case may be. I wish to record in this
reference a happy week once passed, at vintage time, in the Lower
Apennines, with a beautiful copy of "Hippolytus," bound in white, which
had been given me, regardless of my ignorance of Greek, by my dear
Lombard friend who resembles a faun. I carried it about in my pocket;
sometimes, at rare intervals, spelling out some word in _mai_ or in
_totos_, and casting a glance on the interleaved crib; but more often
letting the volume repose by me on the grass and crushed mint of the
cool yard under the fig tree, while the last belated cicala sawed, and
the wild bees hummed in the ivy flower of the old villa wall. For once
you know the spirit of a book, there is a process (known to Petrarch
with reference to Homer, whom he was unable to understand) of taking in
its charm by merely turning over the pages, or even, as I say, in
carrying it about. The literary essence, which is uncommonly subtle, has
various modes of acting on us; and this particular manner of absorbing a
book's spirit stands to the material operation called _reading_, much in
the same way that _smell_, the act of breathing invisible volatile
particles, stands to the m