Personally, direct bookish talk is my abomination.  A knowledge of books ought to give a man a delicate allusiveness, an aptitude for pointed quotation.  A book ought to be only incidentally, not anatomically, discussed; and I am pleased to be able to think that there is a good deal of this allusive talk at the University, and that the only reason that there is not more is that professional demands are so insistent, and work so thorough, that academical persons cannot keep up their general reading as they would like to do.

And then we come to what I have called, for want of a better word, the ethical motive for reading; it might sound at first as if I meant that people ought to read improving books, but that is exactly what I do not mean.  I have very strong opinions on this point, and hold that what I call the ethical motive for reading is the best of all—­indeed the only true one.  And yet I find a great difficulty in putting into words what is a very elusive and delicate thought.  But my belief is this.  As I make my slow pilgrimage through the world, a certain sense of beautiful mystery seems to gather and grow.  I see that many people find the world dreary—­and, indeed, there must be spaces of dreariness in it for us all—­some find it interesting; some surprising; some find it entirely satisfactory.  But those who find it satisfactory seem to me, as a rule, to be tough, coarse, healthy natures, who find success attractive and food digestible:  who do not trouble their heads very much about other people, but go cheerfully and optimistically on their way, closing their eyes as far as possible to things painful and sorrowful, and getting all the pleasure they can out of material enjoyments.

Well, to speak very sincerely and humbly, such a life seems to me the worst kind of failure.  It is the life that men were living in the days of Noah, and out of such lives comes nothing that is wise or useful or good.  Such men leave the world as they found it, except for the fact that they have eaten a little way into it, like a mite into a cheese, and leave a track of decomposition behind them.

I do not know why so much that is hard and painful and sad is interwoven with our life here; but I see, or seem to see, that it is meant to be so interwoven.  All the best and most beautiful flowers of character and thought seem to me to spring up in the track of suffering; and what is the most sorrowful of all mysteries, the mystery of death, the ceasing to be, the relinquishing of our hopes and dreams, the breaking of our dearest ties, becomes more solemn and awe-inspiring the nearer we advance to it.

I do not mean that we are to go and search for unhappiness; but, on the other hand, the only happiness worth seeking for is a happiness which takes all these dark things into account, looks them in the face, reads the secret of their dim eyes and set lips, dwells with them, and learns to be tranquil in their presence.