re._

_The Vital Quality in Literature_

_To Get the Spiritual Essence of a Great Book One Must Study
the Man Who Wrote It--The Man Is the Best Epitome His
Message._

_In this volume as in its predecessor, "Comfort Found in Good Old
Books," my aim has been to enforce the theory that behind every great
book is a man, greater than the best book that he ever wrote. This
strong spiritual quality which every one of the great authors puts
into his best books is what we should strive to secure when we read
these great classics. Unless we get this spiritual part we miss the
essence of the book._

_Hence it has been my aim in this volume to make clear what manner of
men wrote these books which serve as the landmarks of modern English
literature._

_The scope of this book is limited, but from Macaulay to Kipling the
effort has been to include those representative modern English
authors who both in prose and verse best reflect the spiritual
tendencies of their age. Whether essayists, historians, novelists or
poets each of these writers has furnished something distinctive; each
has caught some salient feature of his age and fixed it for all time
in the amber of his thought._

_And what a bead-roll is this of great English worthies: Macaulay, the
most brilliant and learned of all English essayists; Scott, the finest
story-teller of his own or any other age; Carlyle, the inspirer of
ambitious youth; De Quincey, the greatest artist in style, whose words
are as music to the sensitive ear; Dickens, the master painter of
sorrows and joys of the common people; Thackeray, the best interpreter
of human life and character; Charlotte Bronte, the brooding Celtic
genius who laid bare the hearts of women; George Eliot, the greatest
artist of her sex in mastery of human emotion; Ruskin, the first to
teach the common people appreciation of art and architecture;
Tennyson, the melodious singer who voiced the highest aspiration of
his time; Browning, the greatest dramatic poet since Shakespeare;
Charles Lamb, one of the tenderest of essayists; George Meredith, the
most brilliant and suggestive novelist of the Victorian age;
Stevenson, the best beloved and most artistic story-teller of his day;
Hardy, the master painter of tragedies of rural life; and Kipling, the
interpreter of Anglo-Indian life, the singer of the new age of science
and discovery, the laureate of the gospel of blood and iron._

_The work of each of these