For example, can any one sensitive to such considerations deny that the meadows of the world are greener for the Twenty-third Psalm, or the starry sky the gainer in our imagination by the solemn cadences of the book of Job?
All our experiences, new and personal as they may seem to us, owe incalculably their depth and thrill to the ancestral sentiment in our blood, and joy and sorrow are for us what they are, no little because so many old, far-away generations of men and women have joyed and sorrowed in the same way before us.

Literature but represents that concentrated sentiment, and satisfies through expression our human need for some sympathetic participation with us in our human experience.
That a long-dead poet walking in the Spring was moved as I am by the unfolding leaf and the returning bird imparts an added significance to my own feelings; and that some wise and beautiful old book knew and said it all long ago, makes my life seem all the more mysteriously romantic for me to-day.

Besides, books are not only such good companions for what they say, but for what they are.

As with any other friend, you may go a whole day with them, and not have a word to say to each other, yet be happily conscious of a perfect companionship.

The book we know and love--and, of course, one would never risk taking a book we didn't know for a companion--has long since become a symbol for us, a symbol of certain moods and ways of feeling, a key to certain kingdoms of the spirit, of which it is often sufficient just to hold the key in our hands.