In our intellectual experience there can probably be but one first time. We go back to an author again and again; yet in all save a few exceptional cases, the pleasure of the second or third reading is only a lesser degree of the first. On the other hand, a favorite piece of music one may hear with the same keen delight any number of times. Is it because music is so largely made up of the sensuous, at least to a greater extent than is any other phase of art? It is the same with perfumes, flavors, colors: they never lose their first freshness to us. But a book or a poem we absorb and exhaust more or less,--that is, as to its intellectual content; and if we return to it, it is probably for some charm or quality that is to the spirit what music or perfume or color is to the senses, or what a congenial companion is to our social instincts. We shall not go back to a book that does not in some way, apart from its mere intellectual service, relate itself to our lives. Time tries all things, and surely does it sift out the false and fugitive in books. Contemporary judgment is usually unreliable. It is like trial by jury, the local and accidental play so large a part in the verdict. The next age, or the next, forms the higher court of appeal. In the same way a man’s future self corrects or sets aside his verdict of to-day. If in later life he reaffirms his first opinion, the chances are that time is on his side. There is, of course, a sense or a degree in which any book that one has once read becomes a sucked orange; but some books become much more so than others. I doubt if many of us find books that, like a few people, become dearer to us as time passes, and to which we always return with increasing interest. And the reason is that one’s mental and spiritual outlook is not uniformly the same, while his social and human wants, such as his need of food and warmth, do remain about the same. One in a measure absorbs the book and puts it behind him. It is like a place he has visited: he has had the view, and until the impression is more or less obliterated he does not care to repeat it. But one’s friend is always a fresh stimulus: he keeps the past alive for him (which the book can also do in a measure), and he consecrates the present (which the book cannot do). Indeed, the sense of companionship which one can have in a book is but a faint echo or shadow of the companionship he has with persons. Yet this sense of companionship does adhere to some books much more vividly than to others. They are our books; they were written for us; they become a part of our lives, and they do not drop away from us with the lapse of time, as do others. Different readers have felt this way about such writers as Emerson, Carlyle, Wordsworth, and Whitman; but it may be a question how writers who make the intense personal appeal that these men make will wear. Are they too special and individual for future generations to recognize close kinship with? Will each age have its