If you have once seen a picture, says Emerson somewhere, never look at it again. He means that hours of insight are so rare that a really high and satisfying experience with a book, picture, landscape, or other object of beauty is to be accepted as final, a favor of Providence which we have no warrant to expect repeated. If you have seen a thing, therefore, really seen it and communed with the soul of it, let that suffice you. Attempts to live the hour over a second time will only result in failure, or, worse yet, will cast a shadow over what ought to have been a permanently luminous recollection.
There is a modicum of sound philosophy in the advice. We must take it as the counsel of an idealist, and follow it or not as occasion bids. The words of such men, as one of them was given to saying, are only for those who have ears to hear. We may be
