There is no easy road to this last height in the long and painful process of education; and time is an essential element in the process, because it is a matter of growth.
There are, it is true, a few men and women who seem born with this power of living in the heart of things and possessing them in the imagination without having gone through the long and painful stages of preparatory education; but genius is not only inexplicable, it is also so rare that for the immense majority of men any effort to comprehend it must be purely academic.

It is enough to know that if we are in any degree to share with men and women of genius the faculty of vision, insight, and creative energy, we must master the conditions which favor the development of those supreme gifts.

There is laid, therefore, upon the student who wishes to get the vital quality of literature the necessity of repeating, by deliberate and intelligent design, the process which in so many of the masters of the arts has been, apparently, accomplished instinctively.

To make observation, study, and experience part of one's spiritual and intellectual capital, it is, in the first place, necessary to saturate one's self with that which one is studying; to possess it by constant familiarity; to let the imagination play upon it; to meditate upon it.

And it is necessary, in the second place, to make this practice habitual; when it becomes habitual, it will become largely unconscious: one does it by instinct rather than by deliberation.