E-text prepared by David Clarke, Sankar Viswanathan, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net/) To grasp the shadowy and fantasmal form of a book, to hold it fast, to turn it over and survey it at leisure--that is the effort of a critic of books, and it is perpetually defeated. Nothing, no power, will keep a book steady and motionless before us, so that we may have time to examine its shape and design. As quickly as we read, it melts and shifts in the memory; even at the moment when the last page is turned, a great part of the book, its finer detail, is already vague and doubtful. A little later, after a few days or months, how much is really left …
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