LITEEAEY VALUES 23 



of the tree. There stands the tree in all its sum- 

 mer glory ; will you really know it any better after 

 you have laid bare every root and rootlet ? There 

 stand Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dante, Homer. Eead 

 them, give yourself to them, and master them if 

 you are man enough. The poets are not to be ana- 

 lyzed, they are to be enjoyed ; they are not to he 

 studied, but to be loved ; they are not for knowledge, 

 but for culture — to enhance our appreciation of life 

 and our mastery over its elements. All the mere facts 

 about a poet's work are as chaff compared with the 

 appreciation of one fine line or fine sentence. Why 

 study a great poet at all after the manner of the 

 dissecting-room ? Why not rather seek to make the 

 acquaintance of his living soul and to feel its power ? 

 The mere study of words, too, — of their origin 

 and history, or of the relation of your own language 

 to some other, — how little that avails ! As little 

 as a knowledge of the making and tempering of a 

 sword would help a man to be a good swordsman. 

 What avails in literature is a quick and delicate 

 sense of the life and individuality of words — "a 

 sense practiced as a blind man's touch," or as a 

 musician's ear, so that the magic of the true style 

 is at once felt and appreciated ; this, and an equally 

 quick and delicate sense of the life and individuality 

 of things. " Is there any taste in the white of an 

 egg ? " No more is there in much merely correct 

 writing. There is the use of language as the vehicle 

 of knowledge, and there is the use of it as an in- 

 strument of the imagination. In Wordsworth's line, 



