I want people to say frankly what real part spiritual
agencies or religious ideas have played in their lives, whether
such agencies and ideas have modified their conduct, or have been
modified by their inclinations and habits. I long to know a
thousand things about my fellow-men--how they bear pain, how they
confront the prospect of death, the hopes by which they live, the
fears that overshadow them, the stuff of their lives, the influence
of their emotions. It has long been thought, and it is still
thought by many narrow precisians, indelicate and egotistical to do
this. And the result is that we can find in books all the things
that do not matter, while the thoughts that are of deep and vital
interest are withheld.
Such books as Montaigne's Essays, Rousseau's Confessions, Mrs.
Carlyle's Letters, Mrs. Oliphant's Memoirs, the Autobiography of B.
R. Haydon, to name but a few books that come into my mind, are the
sort of books that I crave for, because they are books in which one
sees right into the heart and soul of another.
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