Page:Omniana 2.djvu/31

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OMNIANA.
21

lington, lost half its charms, or rather increased my aversion to the piece by an additional sense of incongruity. Then I learnt the immense difference between reading and seeing a play,..no wonder, indeed. For who has not passed over with his eye a hundred passages without offence, which he yet could not have even read aloud, or have heard so read by another person, without an inward struggle? In mere passive silent reading the thoughts remain mere thoughts, and these to not our own,..phantoms with no attribute of place, no sense of appropriation, that flit over the consciousness as shadows over the grass or young corn in an April day. But even the sound of our own or another's voice takes them out of that lifeless, twilight realm of idea, which is the confine, the intermundium, as it were, of existence and non-existence. Merely that the thoughts have becoming audible, by blending with