210 LITERAET VALUES 



eralizations, such as we find scattered through 

 literature, as when De Quincey says of the Ro- 

 man that he was great in the presence of man, 

 never in the presence of nature ; or his distinction 

 between the literature of power and the literature 

 of knowledge, or similar illuminating distinctions in 

 the prose of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, Arnold, 

 Goethe, JJessing. Arnold's dictum that poetry is 

 a criticism of life, is suggestive, because it sets you 

 thinking to verify or to disprove it. John Stuart 

 Mill was not what one would call a suggestive 

 writer, yet the following sentence, which Mr. Au- 

 gustine Birrell has lately made use of, makes a de- 

 cided ripple in one's mind : " I have learnt from 

 experience that many false opinions may be ex- 

 changed for true ones without in the least altering 

 the habits of mind of which false opinions are the 

 result." In a new home writer whose first books 

 are but a year or two old, I find deeply suggestive 

 sentences on nearly every page. Here are two or 

 three of them : " In your inmost soul you are 

 as well suited to the whole cosmical order and every 

 part of it as to your own body. You belong here. 

 Did you suppose that you belonged to some other 

 world than this, or that you belonged nowhere at 

 all, just a waif on the bosom of the eternities ? . , . 

 Conceivably He might have flung you into a world 

 that was unrelated to you, and might have left yoU' 

 to be acclimated at your own risk ; but you happen 

 to know that this is not the case. You have lived 

 here always ; this is the ancestral demesne ; for 



