Another thing is true of the best literature: we cannot separate our pleasure and profit in the subject-matter from our pleasure and profit in the personality of the writer. We do not know whether it is Hawthorne himself that we most delight in, or his style and the characters and the action of his romance. One thing is quite certain: where there is no distinct personal flavor to the page, no stamp of a new individual force, we soon tire of it. The savor of every true literary production comes from the man himself. Hence, without attempting a formal definition of literature, one may say that the literary quality seems to arise from a certain vital relation of the writer with subject-matter. It is _his_ subject; it blends with the very texture of his mind; his relation to it is primary and personal, not secondary and mechanical. The secret is not in any prescribed arrangement of the words--it is in the quality of mind or spirit that warms the words and shines through them. A good book, says Milton, is the precious life-blood of a master spirit. Unless there is blood in it, unless the vital currents of a rare spirit flow through it and vivify it, it has not the gift of life. In all good literature we have a sense of touching something alive and real. The writer uses words not as tools or appliances; they are more like his hand or his eye or his ear--the living, palpable body of his thought, the incarnation of his spirit. The true writer always establishes intimate and personal relations with his reader. He comes forth, he is not concealed; he is immanent in his words, we feel him, our spirits touch his spirit. Style in letters is a quality of mind--a certain flavor imparted to words by the personality back of them. Pass language through one mind and it is tasteless and colorless; pass it through another, and it acquires an entirely new value and significance and gives us a unique pleasure. In the one case the sentences are artificial; in the other they bud and sprout out of the man himself as naturally as the plants and trees out of the soil. There is nothing else in the world so sensitive and chameleon-like as language; it takes on at once the hue and quality of the mind that uses it. See how neutral and impersonal, or old and worn and faded the words look in the pages of some writers, then see how drastic or new and individual they become when a mind of another type marshals them into sentences. What vigor and life in them! they seem to have been newly coined since we last met them. It is the test of a writer’s real worth--does the language tarnish, as it were, in his hand, or is it brightened and freshened in his use?