I would not be hurried by any love of system, by any exaggeration of
instincts, to underrate the Book. We all know, that, as the human body
can be nourished on any food, though it were boiled grass and the broth
of shoes, so the human mind can be fed by any knowledge. And great and
heroic men have existed, who had almost no other information than by the
printed page. I only would say, that it needs a strong head to bear that
diet. One must be an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, 'He
that would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry out the wealth
of the Indies.' There is, then, creative reading as well as creative
writing. When the mind is braced by labour and invention, the page of
whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every
sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad
as the world. We then see, what is always true, that, as the seer's hour
of vision is short and rare among heavy days and months, so is its
record, perchance, the least part of his volume. The discerning will
read, in his Plato or Shakespeare, only that least part,--only the
authentic utterances of the oracle; all the rest he rejects, were it
never so many times Plato's and Shakespeare's.--R. W. EMERSON. _The
American Scholar._