As in all other reading, novels should awaken you to a new life. You should choose those that have the truest effect upon your goings and comings after you have put them aside. You must agree that those treating of an impossible, untrue social condition, as some money-grabbing manufacturer of stories pretends to see it, will not have this effect. Neither will those of untrue chivalry and sentiment in which untrue ladies weep unnatural tears, and untrue heroes do impossible deeds. Such trivial falsities merely chew up the all too few hours allotted mortals upon this good ship, the Earth. Which then are those novels that are to be read not for the purpose of passing the time, but of holding up the time, and of making every minute more real, more full of meaning,—for that is the function of all great books? There is a poem of John Keats beginning, Lo—I must tell a tale of chivalry; For large white plumes are dancing in mine eye. Perhaps these lines to every one do not carry the same magic beauty and promise of long-dreamed-of things that they do to me. The poem was never finished, and I, for one, deeply regret it, as surely we would have had a tale to set our hearts afire with the clangor of the mediæval tournament, or the lone quest of a golden armored knight. Sir Walter Scott told such tales in prose and his novels are of the greatest in literature. Honoré de Balzac told stories of French life in which there is nothing specially chivalric, nothing in that sense bewitching, and yet his tales, too, are of the greatest in literature. The terms Realism and Romanticism are used to describe two different aspects of art, music and literature. We will use them in considering the relation of novels to life.