John Stuart Mill records in his Autobiography how Wordsworth’s poetry brought about in him a spiritual regeneration. At the age of twenty-one, precociously far advanced in his study of economics and philosophy, he found himself dejected and with no clear outlook upon life. He had often heard of the uplifting power of poetry, and read the whole of Byron, but Byron did him no good. He took up Wordsworth’s poems “from curiosity, with no expectation of mental relief.” “I found myself,” he says, “at once better and happier as I came under their influence.” The reading of Wordsworth was the immediate occasion, though not the sole cause, of a complete change in his way of thinking, and his new way of thinking led him to life-long associations with other great men. We cannot tell which poet, which thinker, will do for us what Wordsworth did for Mill. But while we are young we can take trial excursions into literature until we find our own. And when we do find our own, the treasure that is most precious to our souls, we shall know it, and know it the better, perhaps, if we have tried many good books and failed to like them. If we are to rely so frankly upon our own likings, a word of caution may be necessary to help us distinguish liberty of choice from unreasonable license. We have to ask not only, Does this book interest me?--but, Does this book appeal to the best tastes and emotions in me? Many of us, by no means bad human beings, are so constituted that if our eye meets the morbid, the coarse, the senselessly horrible, we are fascinated, we are indeed interested. But it requires only the most simple self-analysis and a little honesty, to pull ourselves together and realize that it is an unworthy side of us, a side that we do not care to show our friends, which is being held at attention. Not that we need, like the stupidest of the old Puritans, be afraid of a book simply because it does thrill us and make us breathless. For every bad book which holds the depraved mind guiltily alert, a good book can be found, so absorbing, so compelling, that beside it the bad book is tame. I once had a pupil whose transparent honesty was only one of his many lovable qualities. He believed that “Literature” consisted of dull books written by authors who died long ago. The ill-reasoned conclusion was his own, but I found that the raw materials of his error lay in the prudishness of one of his teachers. When I told him that “Huckleberry Finn,” by a very live author, is literature, and that a short story by Mrs. Mary Wilkins-Freeman in a current magazine seemed to me literature of rare excellence, his delight so aroused his wits that for some time after that my part of the lessons consisted merely in meeting his enthusiasm halfway.