I think we go back to books not so much for the amount of pleasure we have had in them, as the kind of pleasure. There is a pleasure both in books and in life that is inconsistent with health and wholeness, and there is a pleasure that is consistent with these things. The instinct of self-preservation makes us cleave to the latter. I do not think we go back to the exciting books,--they do not usually leave a good taste in the mouth; neither to the dull books, which leave no taste at all in the mouth; but to the quiet, mildly tonic and stimulating books,--books that have the virtues of sanity and good nature, and that keep faith with us. At any rate, an enduring fame is of slow growth. The man of the moment is rarely the man of the eternities. If your name is upon all men’s tongues to-day, some other name is likely to be there to-morrow. XVII THE SPELL OF THE PAST I notice that as a man grows old he is more and more fond of quoting his father,--what he said, what he did. It has more and more force or authority with him. It is a tribute to the past. Not until one has reached the meridian of life or gone beyond it, does the spell of the past begin to creep over him. Said a middle-aged woman to me the other day, “Old people are beginning to look very good to me; I like to be near them and to hear them talk.” It is a common experience. I have seen many a granny on the street whom I felt like kidnapping, taking home, and seating in my chimney corner, for the sake of the fragrance and pathos of the past which hovered about her; for the sake also, I suppose, of the filial yearning which is pretty sure to revive in one after a certain time. No woman can ever know the depths of her love for her mother until she has become a mother herself, and no man knows the depths of his love for his father until he has become a father. When we have experienced what they experienced, when we have traveled over the road which they traveled over, they assume a new value, a new sacredness in our eyes. They are then our former selves, and a peculiarly tender regard for them awakens in our hearts. There is pathos in the fact that so many people lose their parents before the experiences of life have brought about that final flavoring and ripening of the filial instinct to which I refer.