I have heard of a man who made it a law for himself never to read any book again which had greatly pleased him on a first perusal; lest a second reading should in some degree disturb the pleasurable impression which he wished to retain of it. This person must have read only for his amusement, otherwise he would have known that a book is worth little if it deserves to be perused but once: and moreover that as the same landscape appears differently at different seasons of the year, at morning and at evening, in bright weather and in cloudy, by moonlight, and at noon-day, so does the same book produce a very different effect upon the same reader at different times and under different circumstances. I have elsewhere said that the man of one book is proverbially formidable; but the man of one reading, though he should read through an ample library would never become so. The studious man who at forty re-peruses books which he has read in his youth or early manhood, vivid as his recollections of them may be, finds them new, because he brings another mind to the perusal. Worthless ones with which he may formerly have been delighted appear flat and unprofitable to his maturer judgement; and on the other hand sterling merit which he was before unable to appreciate, he can now understand and value, having in his acquired knowledge, and habits of reflection the means of assaying it. Sometimes a Poet, when he publishes what in America would be called a lengthy poem, with lengthy annotations, advises the reader in his preface, not to read the notes in their places, as they occur, lest they should interrupt his clear perception and enjoyment of the piece, but to read the poem by itself at first; and then, for his more full contentment, to begin again, and peruse the notes in their order, whereby he will be introduced to the more minute and recondite merits of the work. If the poets who calculate upon many such readers are not wise in their generation, they are happy in it.