or almost we have our hand on the
animal.

If the Kingdom of God, or anything correspondent to it, be within
us, even in such specks of dust as we separately are, why that,
and that only, can be the light by which you or I may hope to
read the Universal: that, and that only, deserves the name of
'_What Is_.' Nay, I can convince you in a moment. Let me recall a
passage of Emerson quoted by me on the morning I first had the
honour to address an audience in Cambridge:

It is remarkable (says he) that involuntarily we always read
as superior beings. Universal history, the poets, the
romancers, do not in their stateliest pictures ... anywhere
make us feel that we intrude, that this is for better men; but
rather is it true that in their grandest strokes we feel most
at home. All that Shakespeare says of the king, yonder slip of
a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself.

It is remarkable, as Emerson says; and yet, as we now
see, quite simple. A learned man may patronise a less learned
one: but the Kingdom of God cannot patronise the Kingdom
of God, the larger the smaller. There _are_ large and small.
Between these two mysteries of a harmonious universe and
the inward soul are granted to live among us certain men
whose minds and souls throw out filaments more delicate
than ours, vibrating to far messages which they bring home,
to report them to us; and these men we call prophets, poets,
masters, great artists, and when they write it, we call their
report literature. But it is by the spark in us that we read it:
and not all the fire of God that was in Shakespeare can dare
to patronise the little spark in me. If it did, I can see--with
Blake--the angelic host

throw down their spears
And water heaven with their tears.

VI

To nurse that spark, common to the king, the sage, the
poorest child--to fan, to draw up to a flame, to 'educate'
_What Is_--to recognise that it is divine, yet frail, tender,
sometimes easily tired, easily quenched under piles of
book-learning--to let it run at play very often, even more
often to let it rest in what Wordsworth calls

a wise passiveness

passive--to use a simile of Coventry Patmore--as a photographic
plate which finds stars that no telescope can discover, simply by
waiting with its face turned upward--to mother it, in short, as
wise mothers do their children--this is what I mean by the Art of
Reading.

For all great Literature, I w