LITERARY VITALITIES 317 



breath and life laid up in these moral springs. The history of literature 

 teaches that the moral fountain-sources of the mental civilization of 

 the race are the richest, the deepest, the strongest, the most enduring 

 of all the Albert and Victoria Nyanza of this mighty flood-tide of 

 the Nile that pours its streams in fertilizing currents down through 

 the intellectual Abyssinias and Egypts of the race, and turns them 

 from deserts into gardens of beauty. In the same sense in which, in 

 Herodotean phrase, ancient Egypt was "the gift of the Nile," is the 

 germ, the dawn, the early daylight of the literatures of humanity the 

 " gift " of the moral nature. Nations sloughed up in superstition or in 

 sensualism too dense to transmit the piercing ray of the moral intelli- 

 gence, have never developed even the beginnings of a literature. 

 Nations on the contrary that slumbered out and through their sen- 

 sualism, nations in whom the moral sense was active, alert, alive, 

 restless, nations of conscience, of awakened moral intelligence, among 

 whom " Seekers after God " arose early and labored late, whether they 

 labored under the starlit dome of Mesopotamia, among the Judsean 

 hills, in the stoa of Zeno or the Academy of Plato, earliest developed 

 both literary substance and literary form : their crude imaginings and 

 cruder yearnings assumed gradually imperishable forms, and wrought 

 themselves into hymns, dramas, idylls, "wisdom" literature, classic- 

 ally expressed codes or utterances that have come on down from the 

 remotest ages, and remind us of the unquiet search after the Invisible, 

 the Intangible, the Ideal, the wonder-working Blue Flower of the 

 infinite distances. 



In the vital trilogy of Herder's epitaph the second word is Liebe ; 

 out of this word Love flashes the second fundamental of all 

 literature. Without fancifully or fantastically twisting the word, it 

 pours its hidden and yet obvious meaning into the ear, as heat, even 

 as the first word signified light in all its limitless connotation. 



Heat is the condition that renders all animal, all intellectual life 

 possible, enduring, immortal. After the life is withdrawn, after the 

 heat is gone, no embalming process can keep the mummy alive: it is, 

 and remains, a mummy, a mass of bitumenized dust, pulseless, inar- 

 ticulate, dead. 



A literature that has no heat, no heart (only the r differentiates 

 the one word from the other), is a literature that has already been 

 reduced to the state of a mummy, motionless, staring, petrified, a bit 

 of bitumen, a handful of salts. Tons of life-symbolizing scarabs hung 

 about its neck would not recall one vital pulsation. 



All the literatures that possess this ineffable charm of heat, of 

 Love, live, as the divine Eros lives, in the act of hovering over the lips 

 of the earthly Psyche. Why is it that those chance couplets and 

 stanzas and epigrams of the anonymous Greek Anthology live, when 

 massy epics and long-drawn-out tragedies uncoil their unwieldy 



