, save when used by genius, with care, be
any final test of that which is better than Knowledge, of that
which is the crown of all scholarship, of _understanding._

But do not therefore lose heart, even in your reading for
strict purposes of examination. Our talk is of reading. Let
me fetch you some comfort from the sister and correlative,
but harder, art of writing.

I most potently believe that the very best writing, in verse or
in prose, can only be produced in moments of high excitement, or
rather (as I should put it) in those moments of still and solemn
awe into which a noble excitement lifts a man. Let me speak only
of prose, of which you may more cautiously allow this than of
verse. I think of St Paul's glorious passage, as rendered in the
Authorised Version, concluding the 15th chapter of his First
Epistle to the Corinthians. First, as you know, comes the long,
swaying, scholastic, somewhat sophisticated argument about the
evidence of resurrection; about the corn, 'that which thou
sowest,' the vivification, the change in vivification, and the
rest. All this, almost purely argumentative, should be read
quietly, with none of the _bravura_ which your prize reader
lavishes on it. The argument works up quietly--at once tensely
and sinuously, but very quietly--to conviction. Then comes the
hush; and then the authoritative voice speaking out of it, awful
and slow, 'Behold, I shew you a mystery' ... and then, all the
latent emotion of faith taking hold and lifting the man on its
surge, 'For the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised
incorruptible' ... and so, incorruption tolling down corruption,
the trumpet smashes death underfoot in victory: until out of the
midst of tumult, sounds the recall; sober, measured, claiming the
purified heart back to discipline. 'Therefore, my beloved
brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the
work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in
vain in the Lord.'

I think of that triumphant passage. I think of the sentences with
which Isaak Walton ends his life of Donne. I think of the last
pages of Motley's "Dutch Republic," with its eulogy on William
the Silent so exquisitely closing:

As long as he lived, he was the guiding-star of a whole brave
nation, and when he died the little children cried in the
streets.

I think of two great prose passages in Thackeray's "Esmond"; of
Landor's "Dream of Boccaccio" ... and so on: and I am