rations, a certain indefinable
something gets into his pages that makes them breathe forth a vital,
living power, a power so great that each reader gets the same
inspirations as those that spoke through the author. That that's
written between the lines is many times more than that that's written
in the lines. It is the spirit of the author that engenders this
power. It is this that gives that extra twenty-five or thirty per cent
that takes a book out of the class called medium and lifts it into the
class called superior,--that extra per cent that makes it the one of
the hundred that is truly successful, while the ninety-nine never see
more than their first edition.

It is this same spiritual power that the author of a great personality
puts into his work, that causes it to go so rapidly from reader to
reader; for the only way that any book circulates in the ultimate is
from mouth to mouth, any book that reaches a large circulation. It is
this that many times causes a single reader, in view of its value to
himself, to purchase numbers of copies for others. "A good poem," says
Emerson, "goes about the world offering itself to reasonable men, who
read it with joy and carry it to their reasonable neighbors. Thus it
draws to it the _wise and generous souls_, confirming their secret
thoughts, and through their sympathy _really publishing itself_."

This is the type of author who writes not with the thought of having
what he writes become literature, but he writes with the sole thought
of reaching the hearts of the people, giving them something of vital
value, something that will broaden, sweeten, enrich, and beautify their
lives; that will lead them to the finding of the higher life and with
it the higher powers and the higher joys. It most always happens,
however, that if he succeeds in thus reaching the people, the becoming
literature part somehow takes care of itself, and far better than if he
aimed for it directly.

The one, on the other hand, who fears to depart from beaten paths, who
allows himself to be bound by arbitrary rules, limits his own creative
powers in just the degree that he allows himself so to be bound. "My
book," says one of the greatest of modern authors, "shall smell of the
pines and resound with the hum of insects. The swallow over my window
shall interweave that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my
web also." Far better, gentle sage, to have it smell of the pines and
resound wit