Much have I travel’d in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been, Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told, That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet never did I breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific--and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise-- Silent, upon a peak in Darien. Something like that experience ambushes the road of any reader, the most commonplace of us. We, too, can travel in the realms of gold. Only three or four men are born in a century who could express the experience so finely as that. But the breathless adventure can be ours, even if we cannot write about it. The great writers themselves are the best guides to one another, for they have kept the reader’s point of view--they had too much imagination, as a rule, to descend to any other point of view. We conjecture that Shakespeare was an omnivorous reader. And so, certainly, were Milton, Browning, Tennyson, Shelley, Carlyle, George Eliot, Macaulay. Nearly all the great writers have been, of course, life-long, assiduous students of the technical characteristics of certain kinds of literature from which they were learning their art. The poet must study the poets; the novelist must study the novelists. But the creative artist is usually far from being a scientific or methodical student of literature as it is laid out (suggestive words!), in handbooks and courses. The nature of literature and the experience of the makers of it seem to confirm us in the belief that books are to be read, to be understood and enjoyed as they come to one’s hands, and not jammed into text-book diagrams of periods and cycles and schools. The great writers of our race, those obviously who know most about literature, seem to have taken their books as they took life, just as they happened to come. They were wanderers, not tourists. And though we shall never see as much by the way as they did and have not the power to travel so far, we can roam through “many goodly states and kingdoms” and be sure of inspiring encounters, if only a small corner of our nature is capable of being inspired.