This process of meditation, if it is to bear its richest fruit, must
be accompanied by a constant play of the imagination, than which there
is no faculty more readily cultivated or more constantly neglected.
Some readers see only a flat surface as they read; others find the
book a door into a real world, and forget that they are dealing with a
book. The real readers get beyond the book, into the life which it
describes. They see the island in "The Tempest;" they hear the tumult
of the storm; they mingle with the little company who, on that magical
stage, reflect all the passions of men and are brought under the spell
of the highest powers of man's spirit. It is a significant fact that
in the lives of men of genius the reading of two or three books has
often provoked an immediate and striking expansion of thought and
power. Samuel Johnson, a clumsy boy in his father's bookshop,
searching for apples, came upon Petrarch, and was destined henceforth
to be a man of letters. John Keats, apprenticed to an apothecary, read
Spenser's "Epithalamium" one golden afternoon in company with his
friend, Cowden Clarke, and from that hour was a poet by the grace of
God.
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