libraries, and he
renews his talents, searching, perhaps unknowingly, for new themes and
tendencies.

When one knows how to read a book, then from its pages the author's
face looks out on him, a face not material, but just the same full of
life. Sienkiewicz's face, looking on us from his books, is not always
the same; it changes, and in his last book ("Quo Vadis") it is quite
different, almost new.

There are some people who throw down a book after having read it, as
one leaves a bottle after having drank the wine from it. There are
others who read books with a pencil in their hands, and they mark
the most striking passages. Afterward, in the hours of rest, in the
moments when one needs a stimulant from within and one searches for
harmony, sympathy of a thing apparently so dead and strange as a book
is, they come back to the marked passages, to their own thoughts,
more comprehensible since an author expressed them; to their own
sentiments, stronger and more natural since they found them in
somebody else's words. Because ofttimes it seems to us--the common
readers--that there is no difference between our interior world and
the horizon of great authors, and we flatter ourselves by believing
that we are 'only less daring, less brave than are thinkers and poets,
that some interior lack of courage stopped us from having formulated
our impressions. And in this sentiment there is a great deal of truth.
But while this expression of our thoughts seems to us to be a daring,
to the others it is a need; they even do not suspect how much they are
daring and new. They must, according to the words of a poet, "Spin
out the love, as the silkworm spins its web." That is their capital
distinction from common mortals; we recognize them by it at once; and
that is the reason we put them above the common level. On the pages
of their books we find not the traces of the accidental, deeper
penetrating into the life or more refined feelings, but the whole
harvest of thoughts, impressions, dispositions, written skilfully,
because studied deeply. We also leave something on these pages. Some
people dry flowers on them, the others preserve reminiscences. In
every one of Sienkiewicz's volumes people will deposit a great many
personal impressions, part of their souls; in every one they will find
them again after many years.

There are three periods in Sienkiewicz's literary life. In the
first he wrote short stories, which are masterpieces of grace