Fancy a reader, in his quest for the real article, going about with this drag-net of a paragraph in his mind. Will the definition or description bear turning around upon itself? Is it a good sample of literary art? The exactness and literalness of science are seldom permissible in literature. That a definition of anything may have literary value it must possess a certain indirect and imaginative character, as when Carlyle defined poetry as the heroic of speech. Contrast with the above John Morley’s definition of literature: “All the books--and they are not so many--where moral truth and human passion are touched with a certain largeness, sanity, and attraction of form.” This is much better literature, because the language is much more flexible and imaginative. It imparts more warmth to the mind; it is more suggestive, while as a literary touchstone it is just as available. Good literature may be a much simpler thing than our teachers would lead us to believe. The prattle of a child may have rare literary value. The little Parisian girl who, when asked by a lady the price of the trinkets she offered for sale, replied, “Judge for yourself, madam; I have tasted no food since yesterday,” expressed herself with consummate art. If she had said simply, “Whatever your ladyship pleases to give,” her reply would have been graceful, but commonplace. By the personal turn which she gave it, she added almost a lyrical touch. When Thackeray changed the title of one of his novels from “Scenes from Town Life,” or some such title, to “Vanity Fair,” he achieved a stroke of art. It is said that a now famous line of Keats was first written thus: “A thing of beauty is a continual joy.” How the effect of the line was heightened by the change of one word, and itself became “a joy forever.” Poe, too, altered two lines of his with like magical effect, when for “To the beauty of fair Greece, And the grandeur of old Rome,” he wrote: “To the glory that was Greece, And the grandeur that was Rome.” The phrase “well of pure English” conveys the same idea as “well of English undefiled,” but how much greater the artistic value of the latter than of the former! Thus the literary value of a sentence may turn upon a single word. The everyday speech of the people is often full of the stuff of which literature is made. No poet could invent better epithets and phrases than abound in the common vernacular. The sayings and proverbs of a people are also, for the most part, of the pure gold of literature.