I remember a young wife who had to part
with her husband for a time. She did not write a mournful poem;
indeed, she was a silent person, and perhaps hardly said a word
about it; but she quietly turned of a deep orange color with
jaundice. A great many people in this world have but one form of
rhetoric for their profoundest experiences,--namely, to waste away
and die. When a man can READ, his paroxysm of feeling is passing.
When he can READ, his thought has slackened its hold.--You talk
about reading Shakspeare, using him as an expression for the
highest intellect, and you wonder that any common person should be
so presumptuous as to suppose his thought can rise above the text
which lies before him. But think a moment. A child's reading of
Shakspeare is one thing, and Coleridge's or Schlegel's reading of
him is another. The saturation-point of each mind differs from
that of every other. But I think it is as true for the small mind
which can only take up a little as for the great one which takes up
much, that the suggested trains of thought and feeling ought always
to rise above--not the author, but the reader's mental version of
the author, whoever he may be.
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