The range and variety of such true literature are as wide and varied as human genius. It includes, for instance, the novel, whenever the novel, as in Balzac, Thackeray, and Fielding, shows this fine, large, sane, attractive touch; it includes verse, when, and only when, moral truth and human passion are touched finely or nobly in this way. Its forms are manifold, and its themes include-- All thoughts, all passions, all delights Whatever stirs this mortal frame. In its shape and form literature may be a hard-headed essay of Bacon or an impassioned lyric of Shelley; its sound may be the majestic organ-peal of Milton or the sumptuous flute music of Keats; its mood may be the scathing fervour of Carlyle or the genial humour of Lamb; its manner may be the rugged strength of Browning or the fastidious grace of Arnold; but, whatever it be, it everywhere contains this high distinction; it touches some vital truth or human passion with "a certain largeness and sanity and attraction of form." What is not sane and large and expressive is not the literature which we meet to study and absorb. Literature, then, is no mere "elegant trifling." It is no mere _belles lettres_. We do not, indeed, pretend, and none but a human machine will pretend, to despise the graces and charms of _belles lettres_. That would be as ridiculous and inhuman as to despise the delights of music or architecture. But literature is more than _belles lettres_; it is something of far superior intellectual weight and dignity, of far superior moral force and energy. In its contents it is a body of the wisest, most suggestive, most impressive utterance of the world's best minds, at their best moments, from the Psalmist to Wordsworth, from the _Iliad_ to _The Ring and the Book_. Meanwhile its outward vesture is full of art and beauty. And without going further we ask, how can one stand in habitual communion with wise, seminal and impressive speech; how can one saturate oneself with its wisdom and energy, without being the better equipped for the demands of both the life within and the life without? "Consider," says Emerson, "what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries have set in their best order the results of their wisdom and learning." Well, let us keep company like that, and what is the result? The value of great literature is that it conveys an endless number of eternal truths for the use and enrichment of human life: moreover it conveys them by a medium of language of such peculiar power and beauty that those truths penetrate keenly into the heart and brain, and, at least in some measure, and often in very large measure, they find a fixed and perennial lodgment there. They enter the blood which reddens our whole mental complexion. * * * * *