ore obvious wholesale process of _taste_.

Nay, such is the virtuous power of books, that, to those who are
initiated and reverent, it can act from the mere title, or more
properly, the binding. Of this I had an instance quite lately in the
library of an old Jacobite house on the North Tyne. This library
contained, besides its properly embodied books, a small collection
existing, so to speak, only in the spirit, or at least in effigy; a
door, to wit, being covered with real book-backs, or, more properly,
backs of real books of which the inside was missing. A quaint,
delightful collection! "Female traits," two volumes; four volumes (what
dinners and breakfasts, as well as suppers, of horrors!) of Webster's
"Vittoria Corombona," etc., the "Siege of Mons," "Ancient Mysteries,"
"The Epigrams of Martial," "A Journey through Italy," and Crebillon's
novels. Contemplating these pseudo shelves of pageless tomes, I felt
acutely how true it is that a book (for the truly lettered) can do its
work without being read. I lingeringly relished (why did not Johnson
give us a verb to _saporate_?) this mixed literature's flavour,
humorous, romantic, and pedantic, beautifully welded. And I recognized
that those gutted-away insides were quite superfluous: they had yielded
their essence and their virtue.

HEARING MUSIC

"Heard melodies," said Keats, "are sweet; but those unheard are
sweeter." The remark is not encouraging to performers, yet, saving their
displeasure, there is some truth in it.

We give too much importance, nowadays, being busy and idle and
mercantile (compatible qualities, alas!) to the material presence of
everything, its power of filling time or space, and particularly of
becoming an item of our budget; forgetful that of the very best things
the material presence is worthless save as first step to a spiritual
existence within our soul. This is particularly the case with music.
There is nothing in the realm of sound at all corresponding to the
actual photographing of a visible object on the retina; our auditive
apparatus, whatever its mysteries, gives no sign of being in any way of
the nature of a phonograph. Moreover, one element of music is certainly
due to the sense of locomotion, the _rhythm_; so that _sound_, to become
music, requires the attention of something more than the mere ear. Nay,
it would seem, despite the contrary assertion of the learned _Stumpf_,
that the greater number of writers on the vexed s