Not that all the changes of the years are necessarily for the better.  They may be neither for better nor for worse.  As the moving train hurries us onward we may enjoy successively the beauties of canyon, prairie and lake, admiring each as we come to it without prejudice to what has gone before.  In youth we love only bright colors and their contrasts—­brilliant sunsets and autumn foliage; in later life we come to appreciate also the more delicate tints and their gradations—­a prospect of swamp-land and distant lake or sea on a gray day; a smoky town in the fog; the tender dove colors of early dawns.  So in youth we eagerly read of blood and glory and wild adventure; Trollope is insufferably dull.  Jane Austen is for old maids; even such a gem as Cranford we do not rate at its true value.  But in after life how their quiet shades and tints come out!  There is no glory in them, no carnage, no combat; but there is charm and fascination in the very slowness of their movement, the shortness of their range, their lack of intensity, the absence of the shrill, high notes and the tremendous bases.

Then there is the re-reading that accuses the reader of another kind of change—­a twist to the right or the left, a cast in the mental eye, or perhaps the correction of such a cast.  The doctrines in some book seemed strange to you once—­almost abhorrent; you are ready to accept them now.  Is it because you then saw through a glass darkly and now more clearly?  Or is your vision darker now than it was?  Your rereading apprizes you that there has been a change of some sort.  Perhaps you must await corroborative testimony before you decide what its nature has been.  Possibly you read today without a blush what your mind of twenty years ago would have been shocked to meet.  Are you broader-minded or just hardened?  These questions are disquieting, but the disturbance that they cause is wholesome, and I know of no way in which they can be raised in more uncompromising form than by re-reading an old favorite, by bringing the alterable fabric of your living, growing and changing mind into contact with the stiff, unyielding yardstick of an unchangeable mental record—­the cast of one phase of a master mind that once was but has passed on.

Here I can not help saying a word of a kind of re-reading that is not the perusal of literature at all with most of us—­the re-reading of our own words, written down in previous years—­old letters, old lectures, articles—­books, perhaps, if we chance to be authors.  Of little value, perhaps, to others, these are of the greatest interest to ourselves because instead of measuring our minds by an outside standard they enable us to set side by side two phases of our own life—­the ego of 1892, perhaps, and that of 1914.  How boyish that other ego was; how it jumped to conclusions; how ignorant it was and how self-confident!  And yet, how fresh it was; how quickly responsive to new impressions; how unspoiled; how aspiring!  If you want to know the changes that have transformed the mind that was into the very different one that now is, read your own old letters.