But sometimes one is confronted with books which are really very difficult to judge, and this sometimes happens because the ecstasy, the true literary feeling, supposing it to be present, is present not here or there, not in a phrase or in a particular passage, but throughout, in a very weak solution, if one may borrow the phraseology of physical science. We read such books, and are puzzled, feeling that, somehow, they are literature, only we can't say why, since on the face of it they seem only to be entertaining reading. Do you know that I can conceive many people who would find something of this difficulty in Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn"? Here you have a tale of the rude America of forty or fifty years ago, of a Mississippi village, full of the most ordinary people, of a boy and a negro who "run away." I don't think anyone with the slightest perception of literature could read it without experiencing extraordinary delight, but I can imagine many people would be a good deal puzzled to justify the pleasure they had received. The "stuff" of the book is so very common and commonplace, isn't it, it seems so frankly a rough bit of recollection drawn up from the author's boyish days with jottings added from the time when he was a pilot on one of the river-boats--it is all so apparently devoid of "literary" feeling that I am sure many a reader must have felt greatly ashamed of his huge enjoyment. To me "Huckleberry Finn" is not a very difficult case. That flight by night down the great unknown, rolling river, between the dim marshy lands and the high "bluffs" of the other shore comes in my mind well under the great "Odyssey" class; it has, indeed, the old, unquenchable joy of wandering into the unknown in a more acute degree than "Pickwick," which, as we have seen, is to be reckoned under the same heading. In a word it is pure romance, and you will note that the story is told by a boy, and that by this method a larger element of wonder is secured, for even in this absurd age children are allowed to be amazed at the spectacle of the world. In the mouth of a man the tale would necessarily have lost somewhat of its "strangeness," since partly from affectation, partly from vicious training, partly from the absorption of the "getting-on" process, grown-up people have largely succeeded in quenching the sense of mystery which should be their principal delight. You have only to read the average book of travels to see how this affectation (or perversion of the soul) has deprived the seeing being of his sight. Dip into a book--say a book on China--and you will probably find that Pekin streets are dusty in summer and muddy in winter, and that the author caught cold through imprudent bathing. So it is well for us that Mark Twain put his story in the mouth of an "infant," who is frankly at liberty to express his sense of the marvels of the world. Later, there is an introduction of the "literary" feeling;