se verse for the expression of the very
highest emotion. The supreme literature is in verse, but the finest
achievements in prose approach so nearly to the finest achievements in
verse that it is ill work deciding between them. In the sense in which
poetry is best understood, all literature is poetry--or is, at
any rate, poetical in quality. Macaulay's ill-informed and unjust
denunciations live because his genuine emotion made them into poetry,
while his _Lays of Ancient Rome_ are dead because they are not the
expression of a genuine emotion. As the literary taste develops, this
quality of emotion, restrained or loosed, will be more and more widely
perceived at large in literature. It is the quality that must be
looked for. It is the quality that unifies literature (and all the
arts).

It is not merely useless, it is harmful, for you to map out literature
into divisions and branches, with different laws, rules, or canons.
The first thing is to obtain some possession of literature. When
you have actually felt some of the emotion which great writers have
striven to impart to you, and when your emotions become so numerous
and puzzling that you feel the need of arranging them and calling them
by names, then--and not before--you can begin to study what has been
attempted in the way of classifying and ticketing literature. Manuals
and treatises are excellent things in their kind, but they are simply
dead weight at the start. You can only acquire really useful
general ideas by first acquiring particular ideas, and putting those
particular ideas together. You cannot make bricks without straw.
Do not worry about literature in the abstract, about theories as to
literature. Get at it. Get hold of literature in the concrete as a dog
gets hold of a bone. If you ask me where you ought to begin, I shall
gaze at you as I might gaze at the faithful animal if he inquired
which end of the bone he ought to attack. It doesn't matter in the
slightest degree where you begin. Begin wherever the fancy takes you
to begin. Literature is a whole.

There is only one restriction for you. You must begin with an
acknowledged classic; you must eschew modern works. The reason for
this does not imply any depreciation of the present age at the expense
of past ages. Indeed, it is important, if you wish ultimately to have
a wide, catholic taste, to guard against the too common assumption
that nothing modern will stand comparison with the classics. In ever