assimilated. The rest passes off in evaporation, respiration and the
like.

The result of all this is that thoughts put on paper are nothing more
than footsteps in the sand: you see the way the man has gone, but to
know what he saw on his walk, you want his eyes.

There is no quality of style that can be gained by reading writers who
possess it; whether it be persuasiveness, imagination, the gift of
drawing comparisons, boldness, bitterness, brevity, grace, ease of
expression or wit, unexpected contrasts, a laconic or naive manner, and
the like. But if these qualities are already in us, exist, that is to
say, potentially, we can call them forth and bring them to
consciousness; we can learn the purposes to which they can be put; we
can be strengthened in our inclination to use them, or get courage to do
so; we can judge by examples the effect of applying them, and so acquire
the correct use of them; and of course it is only when we have arrived
at that point that we actually possess these qualities. The only way in
which reading can form style is by teaching us the use to which we can
put our own natural gifts. We must have these gifts before we begin to
learn the use of them. Without them, reading teaches us nothing but
cold, dead mannerisms and makes us shallow imitators.

The strata of the earth preserve in rows the creatures which lived in
former ages; and the array of books on the shelves of a library stores
up in like manner the errors of the past and the way in which they have
been exposed. Like those creatures, they too were full of life in their
time, and made a great deal of noise; but now they are stiff and
fossilized, and an object of curiosity to the literary palaeontologist
alone.

Herodotus relates that Xerxes wept at the sight of his army, which
stretched further than the eye could reach, in the thought that of all
these, after a hundred years, not one would be alive. And in looking
over a huge catalogue of new books, one might weep at thinking that,
when ten years have passed, not one of them will be heard of.

It is in literature as in life: wherever you turn, you stumble at once
upon the incorrigible mob of humanity, swarming in all directions,
crowding and soiling everything, like flies in summer. Hence the number,
which no man can count, of bad books, those rank weeds of literature,
which draw nourishment from the corn and choke it. The time, money and
attention of the public, which rightfully