for a definition of "good reading." Whatever human beings hare said
well is literature, whether it be the Declaration of Independence or a
love story. Reading consists in nothing more than in taking one of the
volumes in which somebody has said something well, opening it on one's
knee, and beginning.

We take it for granted, then, that we know why we read. We may ask one
further question: How shall we read? One answer is that we should read
with as much of ourselves as a book warrants, with the part of
ourselves that a book demands. Mrs. Browning says:

We get no good
By being ungenerous, even to a book,
And calculating profits--so much help
By so much reading. It is rather when
We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge
Soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound,
Impassioned for its beauty, and salt of truth--
'Tis then we get the right good from a book.

We sometimes know exactly what we wish to get from a book, especially
if it is a volume of information on a definite subject. But the great
book is full of treasures that one does not deliberately seek, and
which indeed one may miss altogether on the first journey through. It
is almost nonsensical to say: Read Macaulay for clearness, Carlyle for
power, Thackeray for ease. Literary excellence is not separated and
bottled up in any such drug-shop array. If Macaulay is a master of
clearness it is because he is much else besides. Unless we read a man
for all there is in him, we get very little; we meet, not a living
human being, not a vital book, but something dead, dismembered,