better efforts, really conveys to any of us that kind of idealising
power, it does so (though dealing mainly, as its professed
instruments, with the most select and ideal remains of ancient
literature) oftenest by truant reading; and thus it happened also,
long ago, with Marius and his friend.

NOTES

43. +Transliteration: Mouseion. The word means "seat of the muses."
Translation: "O sea! O shore! my own Helicon, / How many things have
you uncovered to me, how many things suggested!" Pliny, Letters,
Book I, ix, to Minicius Fundanus.

50. +Transliteration: hoia theous epenenothen aien eontas. Translation:
"such as the gods are endowed with." Homer, Odyssey, 8.365.



CHAPTER V: THE GOLDEN BOOK

[55] THE two lads were lounging together over a book, half-buried in
a heap of dry corn, in an old granary--the quiet corner to which they
had climbed out of the way of their noisier companions on one of
their blandest holiday afternoons. They looked round: the western
sun smote through the broad chinks of the shutters. How like a
picture! and it was precisely the scene described in what they were
reading, with just that added poetic touch in the book which made it
delightful and select, and, in the actual place, the ray of sunlight
transforming the rough grain among the cool brown shadows into heaps
of gold. What they were intent on was, indeed, the book of books,