QUALITIES OF LITERATURE. The first significant thing is the essentially artistic quality of all literature. All art is the expression of life in forms of truth and beauty; or rather, it is the reflection of some truth and beauty which are in the world, but which remain unnoticed until brought to our attention by some sensitive human soul, just as the delicate curves of the shell reflect sounds and harmonies too faint to be otherwise noticed. A hundred men may pass a hayfield and see only the sweaty toil and the windrows of dried grass; but here is one who pauses by a Roumanian meadow, where girls are making hay and singing as they work. He looks deeper, sees truth and beauty where we see only dead grass, and he reflects what he sees in a little poem in which the hay tells its own story: Yesterday's flowers am I, And I have drunk my last sweet draught of dew. Young maidens came and sang me to my death; The moon looks down and sees me in my shroud, The shroud of my last dew. Yesterday's flowers that are yet in me Must needs make way for all to-morrow's flowers. The maidens, too, that sang me to my death Must even so make way for all the maids That are to come. And as my soul, so too their soul will be Laden with fragrance of the days gone by. The maidens that to-morrow come this way Will not remember that I once did bloom, For they will only see the new-born flowers. Yet will my perfume-laden soul bring back, As a sweet memory, to women's hearts Their days of maidenhood. And then they will be sorry that they came To sing me to my death; And all the butterflies will mourn for me. I bear away with me The sunshine's dear remembrance, and the low Soft murmurs of the spring. My breath is sweet as children's prattle is; I drank in all the whole earth's fruitfulness, To make of it the fragrance of my soul That shall outlive my death.[1] One who reads only that first exquisite line, "Yesterday's flowers am I," can never again see hay without recalling the beauty that was hidden from his eyes until the poet found it.