Any other commerce between books and their readers smacks of Baconian
"fruits" and University lectures. It is a prostitution of pleasure to
profit.
As with all the rare things in life, the most delicate flavor of our
pleasure is found not exactly and precisely in the actual taste of the
author himself; not, I mean, in the snatching of huge bites out of
him, but in the fragrance of anticipation; in the dreamy solicitations
of indescribable afterthoughts; in those "airy tongues that syllable
men's names" on the "sands and shores" of the remote margins of our
consciousness. How delicious a pleasure there is in carrying about
with us wherever we go a new book or a new translation from the pen of
our especial master! We need not open it; we need not read it for
days; but it is there--there to be caressed and to caress--when
everything is propitious, and the profane voices are hushed.
I suppose, to take an instance that has for myself a peculiar appeal,
the present edition--"brought out" by the excellent house of
Macmillan--of the great Dostoievsky, is producing even now in the
sensibility of all sorts and conditions of queer readers, a thrilling
series of recurrent pleasures, like the intermittent visits of one's
well-beloved.
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