Hence we may find it a useful maxim that, if our reading be utterly
closed to the great poems of the world, there is something amiss with
our reading. If you find Milton, Dante, Calderon, Goethe, so much
"Hebrew-Greek" to you; if your Homer and Virgil, your Moliere and Scott,
rest year after year undisturbed on their shelves beside your school
trigonometry and your old college text-books; if you have never opened
the _Cid, the Nibelungen, Crusoe_, and _Don Quixote_ since you were a
boy, and are wont to leave the Bible and the Imitation for some wet
Sunday afternoon--know, friend, that your reading can do you little real
good. Your mental digestion is ruined or sadly out of order. No doubt,
to thousands of intelligent educated men who call themselves readers,
the reading through a Canto of _The Purgatorio_, or a Book of the
_Paradise Lost_, is a task as irksome as it would be to decipher an
ill-written manuscript in a language that is almost forgotten. But,
although we are not to be always reading epics, and are chiefly in the
mood for slighter things, to be absolutely unable to read Milton or
Dante with enjoyment, is to be in a very bad way.
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