No one who loves the masters who may be communed with and read
but must see, therefore, and resent the error of making the text
of any one of them a source to draw grammar from, forcing the
parts of speech to stand out stark and cold from the warm text;
or a store of samples whence to draw rhetorical instances,
setting up figures of speech singly and without support of any
neighbor phrase, to be stared at curiously and with intent to
copy or dissect! Here is grammar done without deliberation: the
phrases carry their meaning simply and by a sort of limpid
reflection; the thought is a living thing, not an image
ingeniously contrived and wrought. Pray leave the text whole: it
has no meaning piecemeal; at any rate, not that best, wholesome
meaning, as of a frank and genial friend who talks, not for
himself or for his phrase, but for you. It is questionable morals
to dismember a living frame to seek for its obscure fountains of
life!

When you say that a book was meant to be read, you mean, for one
thing, of course, that it was not meant to be studied. You do not
study a good story, or a haunting poem, or a battle song, or a
love ballad, or any moving narrative, whether it be out of
history or out of fiction--nor any argument, even, that moves
vital in the field of action. You do not have to study these
things; they reveal themselves, you do not stay to see how. They
remain with you, and will not be forgotten or laid by. They cling
like a personal experience, and become the mind's intimates. You
devour a book meant to be read, not because you would fill
yourself or have an anxious care to be nourished, but because it
contains such stuff as it makes the mind hungry to look upon.
Neither do you read it to kill time, but to lengthen time,