nor analyze that cruel reticence
in the breasts of wise men which makes them always hide their deeper
thought. They do not give it to you by way of help, but of reward; and
will make themselves sure that you deserve it before they allow you to
reach it. But it is the same with the physical type of wisdom, gold.
There seems, to you and me, no reason why the electric forces of the
earth should not carry whatever there is of gold within it at once to
the mountain tops, so that kings and people might know that all the
gold they could get was there; and without any trouble of digging, or
anxiety, or chance, or waste of time, cut it away, and coin as much as
they needed. But Nature does not manage it so. She puts it in little
fissures in the earth, nobody knows where: you may dig long and find
none; you must dig painfully to find any.

14. And it is just the same with men's best wisdom. When you come to
a good book, you must ask yourself, "Am I inclined to work as an
Australian miner would? Are my pickaxes and shovels in good order, and
am I in good trim myself, my sleeves well up to the elbow, and my
breath good, and my temper?" And, keeping the figure a little longer,
even at the cost of tiresomeness, for it is a thoroughly useful one,
the metal you are in search of being the author's mind or meaning, his
words are as the rock which you have to crush and smelt in order to get
at it. And your pickaxes are your own care, wit, and learning; your
smelting-furnace is your own thoughtful soul. Do not hope to get at
any good author's meaning without those tools and that fire; often you
will need sharpest, finest chiseling, and patientest fusing, before you
can gather one grain of the metal.

15. And therefore, first of all, I tell you, earnestly and
authoritatively (I _know_ I am right in this), you must get into the
habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their
meaning, syllable by syllable--nay letter by letter. For though it is
only by reason of the opposition of letters in the function of signs,
to sounds in the function of signs, that the study of books is called
"literature," and that a man versed in it is called, by the consent of
nations, a man of letters instead of a man of books, or of words, you
may yet connect with that accidental nomenclature this real fact;--that
you might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live
long enough) and remain an utterly "illiterate," un