And how quaint it is that he should diminish himself so modestly.  “Of course” (he says), “I’m only a Reader, and I don’t know anything about writing——­” Why, you adorable creature, You are our court of final appeal, you are the one we come to, humbly, to know whether, anywhere in our miserable efforts to set out our unruly hearts in parallel lines, we have done an honest thing.  What do we care for what (most of) the critics say?  They (we know only too well) are not criticising us, but, unconsciously, themselves.  They skew their own dreams into their comment, and blame us for not writing what they once wanted to.  You we can trust, for you have looked at life largely and without pettifogging qualms.  The parallel lines of our eager pages meet at Infinity—­that is, in the infinite understanding and judgment of the Perfect Reader.

The enjoyment of literature is a personal communion; it cannot be outwardly instilled.  The utmost the critic can do is read the marriage service over the reader and the book.  The union is consummated, if at all, in secret.  But now and then there comes up the aisle a new Perfect Reader, and all the ghosts of literature wait for him, starry-eyed, by the altar.  And as long as there are Perfect Readers, who read with passion, with glory, and then speed to tell their friends, there will always be, ever and anon, a Perfect Writer.

And so, dear Perfect Reader, a Merry Christmas to you and a New Year of books worthy your devotion!  When you revive from that book that holds you in spell, and find this little note on the cold hearth, I hope you may be pleased.

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THE AUTOGENESIS OF A POET

The mind trudges patiently behind the senses.  Day by day a thousand oddities and charms outline themselves tenderly upon consciousness, but it may be long before understanding comes with brush and colour to fill in the tracery.  One learns nothing until he rediscovers it for himself.  Every now and then, in reading, I have come across something which has given me the wild surmise of pioneering mingled with the faint magic of familiarity—­for instance, some of the famous dicta of Wordsworth and Coleridge and Shelley about poetry.  I realized, then, that a teacher had told me these things in my freshman year at college—­fifteen years ago.  I jotted them down at that time, but they were mere catchwords.  It had taken me fifteen years of vigorous living to overhaul those catchwords and fill them with a meaning of my own.  The two teachers who first gave me some suspicion of what lies in the kingdom of poetry—­who gave “so sweet a prospect into the way as will entice any man to enter into it”—­are both dead.  May I mention their names?—­Francis B. Gummere and Albert Elmer Hancock, both of Haverford College.  I cannot thank them as, now, I would like to.  For I am (I think) approaching a stage where I can somewhat understand and relish the things of which they spoke.  And I wonder afresh at the patience and charity of those who go on lecturing, unabated in zest, to boys of whom one in ten may perhaps, fifteen years later, begin to grasp their message.