discovered that he hadn't anything to say. Happy lad! He had before him
all literature as a field of enjoyment, for all, apparently, was beyond
his creative efforts.

Do those of you who are musicians remember when you first apprehended the
relations between the tonic and the dominant chords? I have heard a small
boy at a piano play these alternately for hours. Such a performance is
torture to you and me; it is the sweetest harmony to him, because it is
new and has just come into his sphere of creative power. When he is
thoroughly satisfied that he can produce the effect at will, he abandons
it for something newer and a little higher. The boy who discovers, without
being told, that the dominant chord, followed by the tonic, produces a
certain musical effect, is doing something that for him is on a par with
Wagner's searching the piano for those marvellous effects of his that are
often beyond technical explanation.

The child who reads what you think is a trivial book, re-reads it, and
reads others like it, is doing this same thing in the domain of
literature--he is following the natural course that will bring him out at
the top after a while.

When we distribute books, then, we distribute ideas, not only actual, but
potential. A book has in it not only the ideas that lie on its surface,
but millions of others that are tied to these by invisible chords, of
which we have touched on but a few--the invisible ancestral memories of
centuries ago, the foretastes of future thoughts in our older selves and
our posterity of centuries hence. When we think of it, it is hard to
realize that a book has not a soul.

Gerald Stanley Lee, in his latest book, a collection of essays on