Thus every book lover re-reads his favorites in a way of his own, just as every individual human being loves or hates or mourns or rejoices in a way of his own.

One can no more describe these idiosyncrasies than he can write a history of all the individuals in the world, but perhaps, in the manner of the ethnological or zoological classifier, it may interest us to glance at the types of a few genera or species.

And first, please note that re-reading is the exact repetition of a dual mental experience, so far at least as one of the minds is concerned.  It is a replica of mind-contact, under conditions obtainable nowhere else in this world and of such nature that some of them seem almost to partake of other-worldliness.  My yesterday’s interview with Smith or Jones, trivial as it is, I can not repeat.  Smith can not remember what he said, and even if he could, he could not say it to me in the same way and to the same purpose.  But my interview with Plato—­with Shakespeare, with Emerson; my talk with Julius Caesar, with Goethe, with Lincoln!  I can duplicate it once, twice, a hundred times.  My own mind—­one party to the contact—­may change, but Plato’s or Lincoln’s is ever the same; they speak no “various language” like Byrant’s nature, but are like that great Author of Nature who has taken them to Himself, in that in them “is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.”  To realize that these men may speak to me today, across the abyss of time, and that I can count on the same message tomorrow, next year and on my death bed, in the same authentic words, producing the same effect, assures me that somewhere, somehow, a miracle has been wrought.

I have said that one of the minds that come thus into contact changes not, while the other, the reader’s, is alterable.  This gives him a sort of standard by which he can measure or at least estimate, the changes that go on within him, the temporary ones due to fluctuations in health, strength or temper, the progressive ones due to natural growth or to outside influences.

In his “Introduction to Don Quixote,” Heine tells us how that book, the first that he ever read, was his mental companion through life.  In that first perusal knowing not “how much irony God had interwoven into the world,” he looked upon the luckless knight as a real hero of romance and wept bitterly when his chivalry and generosity met with ingratitude and violence.  A little later, when the satire dawned upon his comprehension, he could not bear the book.  Still later he read it with contemptuous laughter at the poor knight.  But when in later life, he lay racked on a bed of pain his attitude of sympathy returned.  “Dulcinea del Toboso,” he says “is still the most beautiful woman in the world; although I lie stretched upon the earth, helpless and miserable, I will never take back that assertion.  I can not do otherwise.  On with your lances, ye Knights of the Silver Moon; ye disguised barbers!”