I think most readers of Shakspeare sometimes find themselves thrown
into exalted mental conditions like those produced by music. Then
they may drop the book, to pass at once into the region of thought
without words. We may happen to be very dull folks, you and I, and
probably are, unless there is some particular reason to suppose the
contrary. But we get glimpses now and then of a sphere of
spiritual possibilities, where we, dull as we are now, may sail in
vast circles round the largest compass of earthly intelligences.
--I confess there are times when I feel like the friend I mentioned
to you some time ago,--I hate the very sight of a book. Sometimes
it becomes almost a physical necessity to talk out what is in the
mind, before putting anything else into it. It is very bad to have
thoughts and feelings, which were meant to come out in talk, STRIKE
IN, as they say of some complaints that ought to show outwardly.
I always believed in life rather than in books. I suppose every
day of earth, with its hundred thousand deaths and something more
of births,--with its loves and hates, its triumphs and defeats, its
pangs and blisses, has more of humanity in it than all the books
that were ever written, put together.
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