face, reads the secret of their dim eyes and set lips, dwells with
them, and learns to be tranquil in their presence.

In this mood--and it is a mood which no thoughtful man can hope or
ought to wish to escape--reading becomes less and less a searching
for instructive and impressive facts, and more and more a quest
after wisdom and truth and emotion. More and more I feel the
impenetrability of the mystery that surrounds us; the phenomena of
nature, the discoveries of science, instead of raising the veil,
seem only to make the problem more complex, more bizarre, more
insoluble; the investigation of the laws of light, of electricity,
of chemical action, of the causes of disease, the influence of
heredity--all these things may minister to our convenience and our
health, but they make the mind of God, the nature of the First
Cause, an infinitely more mysterious and inconceivable problem.

But there still remains, inside, so to speak, of these astonishing
facts, a whole range of intimate personal phenomena, of emotion, of
relationship, of mental or spiritual conceptions, such as beauty,
affection, righteousness, which seem to be an even nearer concern,
even more vital to our happiness than the vast laws of which it is
possible for men to be so unconscious, that centuries have rolled
past without their being investigated.

And thus in such a mood reading becomes a patient tracing out of
human emotion, human feeling, when confronted with the sorrows, the
hopes, the motives, the sufferings which beckon us and threaten us
on every side. One desires to know what pure and wise and high-
hearted natures have made of the problem; one desires to let the
sense of beauty--that most spiritual of all pleasures--sink deeper