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 The Corinthian order of social architecture is going out of date.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 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

and

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. 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

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

their wills. If teachers, we shall think of men as good or bad linguists, mathematicians, metaphysicians. The minister of the Gospel, though he can say with Paul, "We are determined to know nothing save the cross," should be something else besides the minister. In order to the best discharge of his especial duties as a bringer of good tidings, as one who can speak a word in season to them that are weary, like his Lord, he must be a "Son of man," with quick pulses, with ready sympathies, with a heart full of tenderness, full of courage. Literature subserves this end, as it calls us away from what is individual to what is general, from what is professional to what touches the highest common interests of all. It takes us out of the routine of ordinary work and makes us recognize the existence of other spheres of thought and feeling. It keeps from stagnation the better portion of our nature, and gives a fulness and breadth to what otherwise would be contracted and narrow. Illustrations of these thoughts are found in every department. Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh, the author of "Spare Hours," is none the worse surgeon, from giving Baxter, and Howe, and Vaughan's poems, and such sterling literature a place in his time, alongside of the Carpenters, Dunglinsons and Velpeaus of the healing art. In our own land, the professional men of the widest influence are the men whom literature has liberalized. Men like Prof. H. B. Smith and Prof. Shedd have drunk deep draughts from every fountain. Men like Prof. Tayler Lewis (if there is his peer) have not contented themselves with what lay in the line of their own department. They have sought the growth and expansion that could be imparted by all that is noble and pure and spiritual in the profoundest and most human of the literature of the world. Rufus Choate would never have attained his power had he only turned the pages of Coke upon Littleton, and Chitty and Blackstone and Story. That splendor of diction, that wealth of illustration, that fascination of vital beauty, which clothed every argument and adorned every plea, sprang from the liberalizing efficacy of the life-blood of the master spirits. of the world, which is treasured up in books. To their influence and mastery he surrendered himself. Daily, nightly, for

a little while, he sought their wise companionship, and reverently listened to their words of truth and power.

We need, further, the literature of which we are writing in order to harmonize us and make us feel our connection with our race. As the life of humanity is integral and continuous, we shall not understand the wants of the present, unless we feel the pulsations and power of the common life. As this generation is the outgrowth of all that preceded it, we must know the past to know the necessities of the present. It is not enough to come in contact with the living, we need to be brought face to face with the dead. The present is not wise enough; we need the cumulative wisdom of all time. To say that books are the cement of ages, is but saying a little of the truth. They contain the spirit of the generations in which they were written. The books of power that men do not let die, are the condensations of the best thought of their time and nation. When Cicero speaks it is not Marcus Tullius only. It is Rome of the first century before Christ. When Augustine speaks, it is not the bishop of Hippo only. The church of his time speaks through him, and he gives the best and fullest statement of their opinions; vague and undefined though they may have been until they had passed through the furnace of his genius, where they were freed from alloy and stamped with the impress of strength, of brilliancy and of beauty, by his master hand. The great writers of the times of Elizabeth, James, Charles and Cromwell, put in circulation the best thoughts of their days, in civil and religious liberty, on forms of government, on theology and on education, for all men's minds were exercised on those themes as never before nor since. The spirit of the nation, aroused to its highest pitch of enthusiasm by the pressure of its necessities, spoke through them as they told their countrymen and the world what could best subserve the interests of a people merging into a freedom which they were resolved to gain and perfect. When we go to them, we go to men who have thought most deeply, and expressed themselves most clearly and powerfully on these topics of undying interest which then arose before the world in their true and majestic proportions. They spoke for humanity, and not for themselves alone.