cian sky; he has taken a
little of the pensive lustre of Virgil, as he wanders by his side
on the slopes of the Aventine; he sees the world as Milton saw it,
through the grey mists of England, as Dante saw it, through the
clear and glowing light of Italy. Of all these colours he composes
for himself a colour that is unique and his own; from all these
glasses by which his life passes on its journey to the real
world, there is formed a special tint, and that is what makes the
imagination of men of letters."

At a single hearing you may not take all that in; but if you should
have any opportunity of recurring to it, you will find this a
satisfactory, full, and instructive account of what is a classic, and
will find in it a full and satisfactory account of what those who have
thought most on literature hope to get from it, and most would
desire to confer upon others by it. Literature consists of till the
books--and they are not so many--where moral truth and human passion
are touched with a certain largeness, sanity, and attraction of form.
My notion of the literary student is one who through books explores
the strange voyages of man's moral reason, the impulses of the human
heart, the chances and changes that have overtaken human ideals
of virtue and happiness, of conduct and manners, and the shifting
fortunes of great conceptions of truth and virtue. Poets, dramatists,
humorists, satirists, masters of fiction, the great preachers,
the character-writers, the maxim-writers, the great political
orators--they are all literature in so far as they teach us to know
man and to know human nature. This is what makes literature, rightly
sifted and selected and rightly studied, not the mere elegant trifling
that it is so often and so erroneously supposed to be, but a
proper instrument for a systematic training of the imagination and
sympathies, and of a genial and varied moral sensibility.

From this point of view let me remind you that books are not the
products of accident and caprice. As Goethe said, if you would
understand an author, you must understand his age. The same thing is
just as true of a book. If you would fully comprehend it, you must
know the age. There is an order; there are causes and relations
between great compositions and the societies in which they have
emerged. Just as the naturalist strives to understand and to explain
the distribution of plants and animals over the surface of