your cooling faith? If you can answer these questions satisfactorily,
your stocktaking as regards the fruit of your traffic with that book
may be reckoned satisfactory. If you cannot answer them satisfactorily,
then either you chose the book badly or your impression that you *read* it
is a mistaken one.

When the result of this stocktaking forces you to the conclusion
that your riches are not so vast as you thought them to be,
it is necessary to look about for the causes of the misfortune.
The causes may be several. You may have been reading worthless books.
This, however, I should say at once, is extremely unlikely.
Habitual and confirmed readers, unless they happen to be reviewers,
seldom read worthless books. In the first place, they are so busy
with books of proved value that they have only a small margin of leisure left
for very modern works, and generally, before they can catch up with the age,
Time or the critic has definitely threshed for them the wheat from the chaff.
No! Mediocrity has not much chance of hoodwinking the serious student.


It is less improbable that the serious student has been choosing his books
badly. He may do this in two ways--absolutely and relatively.
Every reader of long standing has been through the singular experience
of suddenly *seeing* a book with which his eyes have been familiar
for years. He reads a book with a reputation and thinks:
"Yes, this is a good book. This book gives me pleasure."
And then after an interval, perhaps after half a lifetime,
something mysterious happens to his mental sight. He picks up
the book again, and sees a new and profound significance in every sentence,
and he says: "I was perfectly blind to this book before."
Yet he is no cleverer than he used to be. Only something has happened