An essential condition of profitable reading is that it shall be intelligent. The extent to which some persons can go on reading without having any clear idea of what they read is stupefyingly amazing! You may any day talk in society with persons who have gone through exhaustive courses of reading, yet who from them have no more got real ideas than a painted bee would get honey from a painted flower. Fortunately ordinary mortals are not so bad as this; but is there one of us who is not conscious of having tobogganed down many and many a page without pausing thoroughly to seize and master a single thought by the way?
It is well to make in the mind a sharp distinction between apprehending and comprehending. The difference is that between sighting and bagging your game. To run hastily along through a book, catching sight of the meaning of the author, getting a general notion of what he would convey,—casually apprehending his work,—is one thing; it is quite another to enter fully into the thoughts and emotions embodied, to make them yours by thorough appreciation,—in a word to comprehend. The trouble which Gibbon says he took to get the most out of what he read must strike ordinary readers with amazement:—
After glancing my eye over the design and order of a new book, I suspended the perusal until I had finished the task of self-examination; till I had resolved in a solitary walk all that I knew or believed or had thought on the subject of the whole work or of some particular chapter; I was then qualified to discern how much the author added to my original stock; and if I was sometimes satisfied by the agreement, I was sometimes armed by the opposition, of our ideas.
It often happens that the average person does not read with sufficient deliberation even to apprehend what is plainly said. If there be a succession of particulars, for instance, it is only the exceptional reader who takes the time to comprehend fully each in turn. Suppose the passage to be the lines in the "Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni:"—
Your strength, your speed, your fury, and your joy,
Unceasing thunder, and eternal foam.
The ordinary student gets a general and probably a vague impression of cataracts, dashing down from the glacier-heaped hills; and that is the whole of it. A poet does not put in a succession of words like this merely to fill out his line. Coleridge in writing undoubtedly realized the torrent so fully in his imagination that it was as if he were beholding it. "What strength!" was his first thought. "What speed," was the next. "What fury; yet, too, what joy!" Then the ideas of that fury and that joy made it seem to him as if the noise of the waters was the voice in which these emotions were embodied, and as if the unceasing thunder were a sentient cry; while the eternal foam was the visible sign of the mighty passions of the "five wild torrents, fiercely glad."
In the dirge in "Cymbeline," Shakespeare writes:—
Fear no more the frown o' the great,
Thou art past the tyrant's stroke;
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak;
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.
As you read, do you comprehend the exquisite propriety of the succession of the ideas? Death has removed Fidele from the possibility of misfortune; even the lords of the world can trouble no longer. Nay, more; it has done away with all need of care for the sordid details of every-day life, food and raiment. All that earth holds is now alike indifferent to the dead; the pale, wind-shaken reed is neither more nor less important than the steadfast and enduring oak. And to this, the thought runs on, must come even the mighty, the sceptred ones of earth. Not learning, which is mightier than temporal power, can save from this; not physic itself, of which the mission is to fight with death, can in the end escape the universal doom.
All follow this, and come to dust.