Thousands of people pass unthinkingly by a field filled with the common daisies. They know the name of the flower; they may even say, or think, that the flowers make a pretty sight. But a poor young poet plows one up on his farm and tells us of his sympathy for the little flower he has destroyed; tells us, too, how the fate of the daisy suggests to him his own fate, so that all who read the poem by Robert Burns no longer see in the daisy a common flower, but see instead a symbol of beauty.
Bird-song and flower, the west wind as it drives the dead leaves before it or hurries the clouds across the sky or piles up in great masses the waters of the sea; the mountain that rises stark and stern above the plain, the ocean over which men’s ships pass in safety or into whose depths they plunge to their grave—all these things the poet helps us to see and to feel. So once more our Aladdin’s lamp brings us into scenes of enchantment, multiplies our lives, opens our eyes to things that the fairy-folk know right well, but which are forbidden to mortal eye and ear until the spell has worked its will.
These, then, are the three joys of reading: First, to be able to travel at will in any country and in any period of time and to taste the salt of adventure; to hear the great stories that the human race has garnered through centuries of living; to know earth’s heroes and to become a part of the company that surrounds them. Second, to enter into the inheritance of wisdom that has come down from ancient times or that animates those who are the builders of our present world. “Histories make men wise,” said one of the wisest of men, by which he meant that history records the experience of men in their attempts to make the world a place where people may dwell together in safety, and that as men reflect on this experience they become wiser. And poets and prose writers, too, have told in books what they have thought to be the meaning of life. They are like the wise old hermits, dwelling in little cabins by the edge of the enchanted forest, who told Sir Galahad or Sir Gawain or Sir Lancelot about the perils of the forest and how to win their way to the enchanted castle where dwelt the Queen.