Again, let it be noticed that there is much more than the "high seriousness" which is the test of the greatest prose as of the finest poetry. Humor and pathos, tragedy and comedy, all find their place and glimpses of the pageant of human history flit through the pages. It would seem as if it were impossible to read extracts from Thucydides and Tacitus and Gibbon and not long to go to their histories and learn all that could be said by such men about the life of man upon earth, about Athens and Rome and the rise and fall of empires. Selections are unsatisfying and the better they are the more unsatisfying they become. But this is in reality their great merit. They have much beauty in themselves, they awaken pleasant memories, they revive old delights, but, above all, if rightly read they open the gates to the illimitable gardens whence all the flowers which have here been gathered may be found blooming in radiance, unplucked and unbroken and rooted in their native soil. The most important part of the collection is that which gives selections from those writers whose native tongue is English. No translation even of prose can ever quite reproduce its original, and as a rule can not hope to equal it. There are many translations, notably the Elizabethan, which are extremely fine in themselves and memorable examples of English prose. Still they are not the original writings. Something escapes in the translation into another tongue, an impalpable something which can not be held or transmitted. The Bible stands alone, a great literary monument of the noblest and most beautiful English, which has formed English speech and become a part of the language as it is of the thought and emotion of the people who read "King James'" version in all parts of the globe. Yet we know that the version which the people, so fortunate in its possession, wisely and absolutely decline to give up in exchange for any revision is neither an accurate nor a faithful reproduction of its original. Therefore, putting aside the English Bible as wholly by itself, it may be safely said that the soul of a language and the beauties of style which it is capable of exhibiting can only be found and studied in the productions of writers who not only think in the language in which they write, but to whom that speech is native, the inalienable birthright and heritage of their race or country. In such writers we get not only the thought, the humor, or the pathos, all that can be transferred in a translation, but also the pleasure to the ear akin to music, the sense of form, the artistic gratification which form brings, all those attributes which are possible in the highest degree to those only to whom the language is native.