No. 215. The Great Books Course. He had begun to grow unaccountably tired of painting--and of sculpting too. He had never imagined he could feel this way. All he wanted to do now was to read. And the books he wanted to read were the tough, strong, sinewy books of the past. He wanted ideas, music, enlightenment, wisdom, experience. Not entertainment He was reading books he'd always meant to read but had never before gotten around to: books by Tolstoy, by Boris Pasternak, Isaac Babel, George Eliot, George Meredith, Robert Browning, Shelley, Coleridge, John Donne. He was in a somnolent ecstasy. Every sentence he read felt like a kind of healing. Any phrase, for example, from Browning's epic poem, The Ring and The Book (1868), left him cleansed and invigorated. This one is about jewelry: "Virgin as oval tawny pendent tear / at beehive-edge when ripened combs o'erflow...." "Beehive-edge"?