Art & Creativity Quote by William Ellery Channing

Books, for Channing, are less pastime than social ladder: a way to slip the velvet rope and converse with the “superior minds” history would otherwise keep behind glass. The phrasing is brazenly hierarchical. “Intercourse” here means intimate exchange, but the more pointed word is “superior” - a moral and intellectual ranking that flatters the reader’s ambition while quietly scolding the culture’s distractions. He’s selling reading as self-upgrading, not self-soothing.

The intent is didactic in the best 19th-century sense: literature as a technology of character. Channing, a liberal Protestant voice in an America jittery with democratization, is trying to reconcile equality with excellence. You can’t meet “great men” in a young republic the way you might in old Europe, but you can meet them on the page. That’s a deeply American workaround: mass access to elite conversation. The quote sounds inclusive, yet it keeps the canon gated by taste and “best books,” implying that not all print is worth your mind.

The subtext is almost devotional. “Pour their souls into ours” turns reading into a kind of secular communion, an inward sacrament where the author’s distilled life becomes the reader’s private property. It’s also a rebuke to shallow sociability: ordinary “intercourse” with neighbors is no match for the concentrated encounter of a mind at full strength. Channing isn’t praising books as objects; he’s praising them as disciplined intimacy, a way to be changed without asking permission from your time.