a creak on the stair may startle us,—but
we do not go to bed. We reach out our hand for
some favorite volume, Stevenson’s Garden
of Verses, Underwoods, or Emily Bronte’s
Wuthering Heights: and read far on into
the night towards cock-crow. We mingle our reading
with dreams, and read on and on, finding a new feeling
in our book: we find the author’s deeper
meaning. Our reading is undisturbed by the ghost-creep
of childhood and the adventuresome daring of boarding-school.
Formerly we had the mere tale or story; now we feel
in a small degree the soul-expression of the writer—an
indefinable, will-o’-the-wisp sort of thing;
a something not always caught, but that strange intangible
something which lends the spark of immortality to
the master creations.
Literary Monthly, 1909.