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were born. Individuals and nations may grow old, decay and die; but as the race is immortal in its youth, so its thoughts have a like youthful nature, imperishable in their freshness and perpetual in their power. Chaucer will always be as full of life and spring-verdure as when on that April of 1300), his nine and twenty pilgrims "toward Canterbury woulden ride." Shakespeare, "nature's darling," will never know decrepitude and age, but will "warble his native woodnotes wild," when the seventeenth century shall seem as far back in the past as does the times of Herodotus and Sophocles. Literature in its essential idea has a total independence of time and place. As these are the conditions of matter and of physical forces, they can have no connection with, and can place no limit to, that which is spiritual and human, and yet divine. Springing not from the understanding, but from the spirit itself, it is a spiritual power. Seeking to make its impressions on what is most divine in man, its aim is far higher than that of imparting instruction. To touch any or all of the countless sympathies of the heart, is nobler than to communicate a scientific fact. You can not place a Homer in the same category with an Aristotle. You can not compare the Ballad of Chevy Chace with a Newton's Principią. It may impart new knowledge, but it does it only indirectly, and through the materials it uses for another object. While it does not aim at developing the muscle and sinew of an athletic intellect, it is far removed from all tendency to produce an enervation of mind. We know very well the etiolating effect of its abuse, when the whole occupation of the man or woman is that of seeking for sensations, when the aim of life is solely to receive impressions from works of power, without an effort at transmission or reproduction. We know well that the habitual devotion of the indolent mind to what is called light literature is sure to be followed by mental imbecility. We know well that the continual surrender of the whole being to sensuous poetry and to emasculated prose, is worse than opium eating on its enfeebled victim. We know that in every community, there are those who were born to better things, but who have grown to be monsters in selfishness and mental feebleness, through their guilty surrender to this mode of intoxication. Yet this is no argument against a deep and familiar acquaintance with true

literature; yea, the admiration of what God has wrought by the free instrument of human genius.

man.

Literature is not to receive the first place in the life of any We have other objects for living than passively to receive impressions. We are to glorify God by being of use in the world, gaining our bread by the sweat of our brow in aiming to supply some of the great wants of men. From the divine arrangement, we must rigidly retain all literature in a subordinate position.

In our country, it is very evident that no one has a right to live a life of Sybaritic enjoyment, whether it be animal, social, or intellectual. They who live merely to feel refined emotions, are to be classed with those who live for sensual pleasure, although the foul disfigurement may not be so plainly discernible. The past four years' sad history, with its ensanguined pages, has made this revelation, if nothing more, that men must throw the energies of their being into something of positive benefit to mankind; that we must rally to the world's help, and go out of ourselves to be of use to others. Many have been awakened from their selfish dreams of culture, by the piercing calls of some brother man. Sympathies that were wont to waste themselves on books, have had full vent on the battle-field, in the hospitals, or at home, in ministering to the necessities of the wounded hero, or in soothing the sorrow of those who have made the dearest sacrifice to their country. The very rebellion itself teaches that there can be no one class in our land living for itself; each must live for all, none were born to be lilies of the field, destined neither to toil nor spin. The highest literature must be cast aside when it begins to hedge us up in the circle of beauty and of æsthetic culture, so that the beckoning hands of our fellow-men can not meet our eye. Such culture is as false as it is destructive. Mere literary men and women, with nothing developed but the taste, the critics of sermons, of style, of language, the admirers of grace and elegance, and nothing more, are worse than the drones of a hive; while they are nonproducers, they all can sting. The influence of that great heathen poet, Goethe, has been an injury to the world, so far as any have adopted his chief end of life, and made intellectual and aesthetic culture the sole object of their being; choosing

books, acquaintances, and modes of life with these sole views. If the great library of Alexandria existed, and was used for the purposes that a Goethe, and some of our American transcendentalists would have used it, the bishop Theodosius and his monks from Nitria were public benefactors when they destroyed it.

In all true culture the moral must keep pace with the intellectual and æsthetic, or rather, form the foundation and permeate all that is developed with warm human love. The good of the whole must be deemed of more worth than the good of the individual. Secession is in direct opposition to the fundamental law of the race. No man nor body of men have a right to say, "leave us alone," whether it be to cultivate cotton, or to cultivate the intellect; to develop an aristocracy of idlers, on the corner-stone of slavery, or to develop the critical faculty, to the neglect of every other claim.

We are rapidly learning in this day that no man has a right to live unto himself, or to die unto himself. Like the mines of the earth, we were made to be worked, and the gold, silver, and precious stones are to be put in circulation and actual use. The granite, the marble, the sandstone, the limestone, are to take their places in the structure of society when they are wanted. None need set itself apart in misanthropical seclusion to polish itself into a Corinthian column. The Corinthian order of social architecture is going out of date. The ornaments of society are not your connoisseurs, your dilettanti, your bluestockings of either gender, or of none but those who believe with Milton that the end of all learning, whatever its extent and comprehension, is "to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love Him and to imitate Him." The highest culture is that which best fits a man "to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously to all, the offices, both public and private, of peace and war." The period of life when the energies of so many are given to the teachings of others, when we surrender ourselves to the mighty imaginations of the creators in literature, when we delight to grasp their colossal conceptions of beauty and power, and to stand in rapture and in awe before them, when we take them for our guides and wander with them into their

bowers of loveliness, where all things stand sunset-flushed and gorgeous with a glory not of earth; when we surrender ourselves to their full influence, thinking their thoughts and feeling profoundly what they have felt in the depths of their natures; this period must come to an end. If we strive to oppose the design of God in giving us life and a capacity for its duties, we do so at our peril; failing not only in the purpose of our existence, but in the accomplishment of what we seek, that is, the highest culture and the purest enjoyment. Basking in slothful indolence, like the lotos eaters, we shall become emasculated and incapable of manly, vigorous thought, and of manly, vigorous action.

When a nation becomes dissolved in passive admiration for beauty of form, whether in marble or color, or in the higher art of verbal expression, it falls an easy prey to the healthy and the manly Goth or Vandal; and it deserves to fall. The man who has derived from literature that culture only which worship of the form of beauty gives, whether it comes from music, painting, or the soft harmonies of Spenser and Tennyson, ought to be shouldered aside by those who have the moral and intellectual cultivation which springs from the clear vision of reality and truth. The world needs men of a high style of training. It likes the lustre, the intellectual grace, the perfect polish, but it asks, and has a right to ask, that the polish shall be upon Damascus steel, and that the blade shall be drawn for service, not hung up for show. for show. When it is tempered and polished, take it out of the forge, take it off from the grindstone, cease rubbing with emery, or soon there will be nothing left but the sheath and the handle. Apply the friction and the diamond dust when exposure and actual use in the service of men is diminishing its lustre and lessening its gleam.

Here then is the place of literature, in the high meaning of the word. It must be held subordinate to the classics of active life. It is a servant, not a master; but though a servant, it has no menial duties to perform. What Milton says of music, that it "has its religious, glorious and magnificent uses," is no less true of this the highest product of human genius, which speaks to man as man, and addresses itself to what elevates him above the brute and makes him what he is. As the spirit.

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of the writer permeates whatever he writes, whether it be the calm, quiet English of Arthur Helps, or the humor and grace and harmonious flow of our own Irving, or the fiery majesty of Milton's prose, or the eloquence and beauty of Jeremy Taylor, which glides in a perpetual stream, or the weird fascinations of Hawthorne's nervous, pellucid pen, or whether it be the solemn organ peals of the blind Puritan poet, where all the learning, and genius, and beauty, and power of all times past seem to be gathered, beautiful and sublimest to reappear in the "Paradise" which rolls forth its adjusted concords forever and forever, just as the watery wealth of the West and the North, of Superior, Huron, Michigan and Erie, with all their peculiarities of expanse, of depth, of temperature and color, unite and blend in the world's Niagara as it rushes along in perpetual thunder and unceasing foam, terrific in its swift majesty, yet gorgeous with rainbows and bridal veils of the white, pearly, falling water; as the spirit of the writer permeates whatever he writes, whether it be Milton or Burns or Browning or Wadsworth, so it is the spirit of the reader it asks for and wishes to move. Deep calleth unto deep. We are to bring our very souls to receive a full impression from those few master-minds whom God has set like stars in the firmament to shine for men.

The first use of literature is to liberalize. The necessary tendency of the pursuits of life compels such a division of labor, that men of all occupations are in danger of becoming but one thing. Undoubtedly we shall not attain too great a proficiency in any of our chosen employments. There is no probability that we shall be too good editors, lawyers, ministers, farmers, carpenters, doctors, teachers, but there is danger of our being only an editor, only a doctor, only a carpenter, only a teacher. We need something to counteract this tendency to sharpness or narrowness. If we are not on our guard, we shall soon be looking at mankind only from one point of view. Our interests will all be special and professional. If merchants, we shall be looking at men only as consumers of dry goods, groceries and hardware. If lawyers, as persons who will probably be indicted sometime for arson, forgery, or government frauds, or as persons who will be involved in bankruptcy, or at any rate as those who ought to be making

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