very experience
we encounter; they throw around places, hours, situations, occasions,
a quite special glamour of their own, just as one's more human
devotions do; but though they float, like a diffused aroma, round
every circumstance of our days, and may even make tolerable the
otherwise intolerable hours of our impertinent "life's work," we do
not love them because they help us here or help us there; or make us
wiser or make us better; we love them because they are what they are,
and we are what we are; we love them, in fact, for the beautiful
reason which the author of that noble book--a book not in our present
list, by the way, because of something obstinately tough and tedious
in him--I mean Montaigne's Essays--loved his sweet friend Etienne.

Any other commerce between books and their readers smacks of Baconian
"fruits" and University lectures. It is a prostitution of pleasure to
profit.

As with all the rare things in life, the most delicate flavor of our
pleasure is found not exactly and precisely in the actual taste of the
author himself; not, I mean, in the snatching of huge bites out of
him, but in the fragrance of anticipation; in the dreamy solicitations
of indescribable afterthoughts; in those "airy tongues that syllable
men's names" on the "sands and shores" of the remote margins of our
consciousness. How delicious a pleasure there is in carrying about
with us wherever we go a new book or a new translation from the pen of
our especial master! We need not open it; we need not read it for
days; but it is there--there to be caressed and to caress--when
everything is propitious, and the profane voices are hushed.

I suppose, to take an instance that has for myself a peculiar appeal,
the present edition--"brought out" by the excellent house of
Macmillan--of the great Dostoievsky, is producing even now in the
sensibility of all sorts and conditions of queer readers, a thrilling
series of recurrent pleasures, like the intermittent visits of one's
well-beloved.

Would to God the mortal days of geniuses like Dostoievsky could be so
extended that for all the years of one's life, one would have such
works, still not quite finished, in one's lucky hands!

I sometimes doubt whether these sticklers for "the art of
condensation" are really lovers of books at all. For myself, I would
class their cursed short stories with their teasing "economy of
material," as they call it, with those "books that are no books,"
tho