For one branch of literature I must, however, put in a special claim, as it has been such a pleasure to me ever since I learned to read, and that is Poetry. I have heard it sometimes said that this is a taste of youth, and dies a natural death with advancing years. My own experience is quite the contrary. The delight we derive from accurate rhythm, melodious words, fine thoughts, and the depicting of deep emotions, ought to increase as our experience of the world and wider learning make us more familiar with them. This has been the result in my own case and in that of others whom I know or have heard of; for instance, Sir Henry Holland, writing his biography when about eighty years of age, lays stress on the enjoyment the study of the poets continued to afford him; and my mother, at eighty, derived much pleasure in committing to memory and repeating new poems. There is a sense of completeness, of perfection, which is given a fine thought by appropriate expression in rhythmical language, which prose can never equal, and which, through the potent magic of Form, lifts the mind out of the material into the ideal world, and grants us a momentary glimpse of the Infinite. If we do not recall to mind and think over what we read we lose most of the pleasure and all the profit of the action. This was what the English philosopher Hobbes meant when he said,――“If I had read as many books as some men, I should be as ignorant as they.” To read without reflecting is like buying grain for food and never grinding it. Through reflection on the images, incidents, and forms of expression with which reading has stored the memory, the highest enjoyment from the process is secured. The mind, like the body, is maintained in a state of pleasurable activity, not by what it swallows, but by what it digests and assimilates. Many people, however, are like dear Charles Lamb, who artlessly confessed,――“I cannot sit and think――books think for me;” and if they think for all to such good purpose as they did for him, no one could complain.