For the marvelous speeches and songs, however satisfying in themselves, lose some of their meaning when taken out of the structure of which they are a part. The stained glass window is beautiful in the artist’s studio, but when it is set in the church and the light falls through it, it becomes part of a beauty greater than its own. So, too, “Macbeth” is greater than Shakespeare’s lyrics, “Paradise Lost” is greater than all of Milton’s short poems taken together. The true reader of poetry will pass beyond the delight of the perfect stanza to the wider joy of the complete drama, the complete epic. In approaching a long poem, the modern impatient reader is discouraged sometimes by the number of pages of solid verse which follow those first pages into which he has plunged. It is well to remember that in reading poetry, a little traveling of the eye takes the imagination on long journeys, and that imagination will join for us the first page and the last even if we have spent six months in making the intervening journey. “Hamlet” need not be read in a day. If one reads a few lines at a time one will soon be in the depths of it, and there is no danger of losing one’s way. We can spend a month in the first perusal or we can run rapidly through it in the three hours which it is supposed to occupy on the stage. We can go backward and forward in it, pause as long as we will on a single speech, or fly swiftly upon the wings of the action. The sense of leisure, of independence of hourly circumstance, is one of the spiritual uses of poetry. The poet and our own nature will determine the time for us. When we follow the pageant of Shakespeare’s sad histories of the death of kings, we shall not, I hope, comport ourselves like tourists hurrying through a picture gallery in order that we may have “done” it before our train goes. We shall not be so misguided as to plume ourselves when we enter in our diary: “Read two plays of Shakespeare this week.” Reading that consists merely in passing the eye over the page is not reading at all. When we become conscious of turning pages without any inward response, it is time to lay the book down and do something else. When we are really reading, we shall not be conscious of the book and we shall not know how many pages we have read--until we wake up out of dreamland and come back into our own world.