this world and of such nature that some of them seem almost to partake of
other-worldliness. My yesterday's interview with Smith or Jones, trivial
as it is, I can not repeat. Smith can not remember what he said, and even
if he could, he could not say it to me in the same way and to the same
purpose. But my interview with Plato--with Shakespeare, with Emerson; my
talk with Julius Caesar, with Goethe, with Lincoln! I can duplicate it
once, twice, a hundred times. My own mind--one party to the contact--may
change, but Plato's or Lincoln's is ever the same; they speak no "various
language" like Byrant's nature, but are like that great Author of Nature
who has taken them to Himself, in that in them "is no variableness,
neither shadow of turning." To realize that these men may speak to me
today, across the abyss of time, and that I can count on the same message
tomorrow, next year and on my death bed, in the same authentic words,
producing the same effect, assures me that somewhere, somehow, a miracle
has been wrought.

I have said that one of the minds that come thus into contact changes not,
while the other, the reader's, is alterable. This gives him a sort of
standard by which he can measure or at least estimate, the changes that go
on within him, the temporary ones due to fluctuations in health, strength
or temper, the progressive ones due to natural growth or to outside
influences.

In his "Introduction to Don Quixote," Heine tells us how that book, the
first that he ever read, was his mental companion through life. In that
first perusal knowing not "how much irony God had interwoven into the
world," he looked upon the luckless knight as a real hero of romance and
wept bitterly when his chivalry and generosity met with ingratitude and
violence. A little later, when the satire dawned upon his comprehension,
he could not bear the book. Still later he read it with contemptuous