§4 LITERARY CULTURE. 



culture and discipline of education. It is this that unlocks the prison-house 

 of the mind and releases the captive. Carlyle calls literature "the thought 

 of thinking souls". It is that part of thought that is wrought out in the 

 name of the beautiful. A poem like that of Homer, or an essay upon 

 Milton, or Dante, or Caesar from a Macauley, a Taine, or a Froude, is 

 created in the name of beauty, and is a fragment in literature, just as a 

 Corinthian capital is a fragment of art. When truth, in its outward flow, 

 •joins beauty, the two rivers make a new flood called "letters"'. It is an 

 Amazon of broad bosom resembling the sea. The advantage in literature, 

 as in life, is of keeping the best society, reading the best books, and wisely 

 admiring the best things. 



In the words of De Quincey, There is flrst the literature of knowledge; 

 and secondly the literature of power. The function -of the first is to teach, 

 of the second, to move ; the first is a rudder, the second an oar or sail. 

 The first speaks to the mere discursive understanding; the second speaks 

 ultimately, it may happen, to the higher understanding or reason, but 

 always through aff"ections of pleasure and sympathy. If we consider how 

 much literature enlarges the mind, and how much it multiplies, adjusts, 

 rectifies and arranges the ideas, it may well be reckoned equivalent to an 

 additional sense; it aff'ords pleasure which wealth cannot procure, and 

 which poverty cannot entirely take away. It is indeed the garden of wis- 

 dom; and if we wish to gather its choicest flowers, we must enter its divine 

 precincts through the. gate of learning. Nevertheless it is so. common a, 

 luxury that the age has grown fastidious. The moralist is expected to 

 allure men to virtue by his beautiful rhetoric; philosophy must be illus- 

 trated by charming metaphors of captivating fiction; and history, casting 

 aside the odious garb of formal narrative, is required to assume a scenic 

 costume, and teem with the connected interest of a facinating tale. Edward 

 Everett pronounced it the voice of the age and the state. The character, 

 energy and resources of the country are reflected and imaged forth in the 

 conception of its great minds: they are organs of the time; they speak their 

 own though s; but under an impulse like the prophetic enthusiasm of old, 

 they must feel and utter the sentiments which society inspires. There is no 

 reason why the brown hand of labor should not hold Bryant or Longfel- 

 low as well as the plow. Ornamental reading shelters and even 

 streno-thens the growth of what is merely useful. A cornfield never returns 

 a poorer crop because a few wild-flowers bloom in the hedge-row. The 

 refinement of the poor is the triumph of Christian civilization. In our 

 County, we have few who are immensely rich in land or gold. But we 

 have not a dozen families so poor that they have no books, nor so ignorant 

 that they cannot profit by them. And the character of the books read by 

 our people shows their literary culture in a practical manner. As we deter- 

 mine a man's condition by the company he keeps, so we judge the culture 

 of our people by the authors they study. In almost every house, a selection 

 of the classics may be found. Works in science, literature and art; 

 philosophy, history, poetry; the leading writers of Europe; and those of 

 our real sovereigns, Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, Emerson, Channing, 

 Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, Jeff'erson; Cooper, Irving, Hawthorne, 

 Mitchell, Aldrich, Howells, James, Curtis; Doane, Simpson, Durbin, 

 Bascom, King, Chapin; Longfellow, Bryant, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, 

 Saxe— these and the ofierings of scores of others, are as familiar to our 

 people as the surgings of the mighty ocean that kisses our shores. And 



