HOW TO READ.—The greatest books are only to be grasped by the total understanding which is called intuition. As an aid to the realisation of the truth, we may fall back upon the final proofs of idiom and experience. Idiom is the fruit of wisdom on the tree of language; and experience is both the end and the beginning of idiom. What more familiar idiom is there than that which expresses the idea and the experience of reading a book “between the lines”; reading, in fact, what is not there in the perception of our merely logical understanding? And what, again, is more familiar than the experience of “having been done good” by reading a great, particularly a great mystical or poetical work, like the Bible or Milton; still more, by reading such works as the _Mahabharata_? Idiom and experience do not deceive us. The “subconscious” of every great book is vastly greater than its conscious element, as the “subconscious” of each of us is many times richer in content than our conscious minds. Reading between the lines, resulting often and usually in a sense of illuminated bewilderment difficult to put into words, is in reality intuitional reading; the subconscious in the reader is put into relation with the subconscious of the writer. Deep communicates with deep. No “interpretation” of an allegorical kind need result from it. We may be unable at once to put into words any of the ideas we have gathered. Patience! The truths thus grasped will find their way to the conscious mind, and one day, perhaps, to our lips. THE OLD COUNTRY.—A country may grow aged in mind long before it is really old in history, and it may be the case with England that long before she is old in history her mind is becoming aged. The peculiarity of the aged mind is not that it cannot think, but that it cannot think new thoughts. All its energy runs in grooves, and there is none to spare for the cutting of a new road into new ideas. There is little and less “free mind” in England. Like the commons and the commonwealth, all the mind-energy has been appropriated by one interest or another, with the consequence that every fresh idea is compelled either to starve at home or to emigrate abroad. America, as an intellectually youthful nation (may it never grow aged!) reaps the advantage of the decline of its aged parent. Ideas that cannot pick up a living in this country, owing to the appropriations of energy already made, may emigrate to America and flourish there.