Books and Culture | Page 5

as it were, need not
despair,--they have shining examples of successful use of limited
opportunities about them. It is not only possible to make all time enrich
us, but to use all space as if it were our own. To have a book in one's

pocket and the power of fastening one's mind upon it to the exclusion
of every other object or interest is to be independent of the library, with
its unbroken quietness. It is to carry the library with us,--not only the
book, but the repose.
One bright June morning a young man, who happened to be waiting at
a rural station to take a train, discovered one of the foremost of
American writers, who was, all things considered, perhaps the most
richly cultivated man whom the country has yet produced, sitting on the
steps intent upon a book, and entirely oblivious of his surroundings.
The young man's reverence for the poet and critic filled him with desire
to know what book had such power of beguiling into forgetfulness one
of the noblest minds of the time. He affirmed within himself that it
must be a novel. He ventured to approach near enough to read the title,
holding, rightly enough, that a book is not personal property, and that
his act involved no violation of privacy. He discovered that the great
man was reading a Greek play with such relish and abandon that he had
turned a railway station into a private library! One of the foremost of
American novelists, a man of real literary insight and of genuine charm
of style, says that he can write as comfortably on a trunk in a room at a
hotel, waiting to be called for a train, as in his own library. There is a
good deal of discipline behind such a power of concentration as that
illustrated in both these cases; but it is a power which can be cultivated
by any man or woman of resolution. Once acquired, the exercise of it
becomes both easy and delightful. It transforms travel, waiting, and
dreary surroundings into one rich opportunity. The man who has the
"Tempest" in his pocket, and can surrender himself to its spell, can
afford to lose time on cars, ferries, and at out-of-the-way stations; for
the world has become an extension of his library, and wherever he is,
he is at home with his purpose and himself.
Chapter III.
Meditation and Imagination.
There is a book in the British Museum which would have, for many
people, a greater value than any other single volume in the world; it is a

copy of Florio's translation of Montaigne, and it bears Shakespeare's
autograph on a flyleaf. There are other books which must have had the
same ownership; among them were Holinshed's "Chronicles" and
North's translation of Plutarch. Shakespeare would have laid posterity
under still greater obligations, if that were possible, if in some
autobiographic mood he had told us how he read these books; for never,
surely, were books read with greater insight and with more complete
absorption. Indeed, the fruits of this reading were so rich and ripe that
the books from which their juices came seem but dry husks and shells
in comparison. The reader drained the writer dry of every particle of
suggestiveness, and then recreated the material in new and
imperishable forms. The process of reproduction was individual, and is
not to be shared by others; it was the expression of that rare and
inexplicable personal energy which we call genius; but the process of
absorption may be shared by all who care to submit to the discipline
which it involves. It is clear that Shakespeare read in such a way as to
possess what he read; he not only remembered it, but he incorporated it
into himself. No other kind of reading could have brought the East out
of its grave, with its rich and languorous atmosphere steeping the
senses in the charm of Cleopatra, or recalled the massive and
powerfully organised life of Rome about the person of the great Cæsar.
Shakespeare read his books with such insight and imagination that they
became part of himself; and so far as this process is concerned, the
reader of to-day can follow in his steps.
The majority of people have not learned this secret; they read for
information or for refreshment; they do not read for enrichment.
Feeding one's nature at all the sources of life, browsing at will on all
the uplands of knowledge and thought, do not bear the fruit of
acquirement only; they put us into personal possession of the vitality,
the truth, and the beauty about us. A man may know the plays of
Shakespeare accurately as regards their order, form, construction, and
language, and yet remain almost without knowledge of