226 LITEEAEY VALUES 



insensible to the marvelous genius displayed in the 

 story, but it left me cold and unmoved. A feeling 

 of unreality haunted me on every page. The fault 

 may have been my own. I give myself reluctantly 

 to a novel, yet I love to be entirely mastered by one. 

 But my poor success with this one, of course, makes 

 me think that Dickens's hold upon the future is not 

 at all secure. A man of wonderful talents, hut of 

 no deep seriousness ; a matchless mimic through and 

 through, and nothing else. But I am proud to add 

 that my boy, a youth of eighteen, reads his books 

 with great enthusiasm. 



Natural, irrepressible humor is always welcome ; 

 but the humor of the grotesque, the exaggerated, 

 the distorted, is like a fashion in dress : it has its 

 day. How surely we tire of the loud, the too pro- 

 nounced, the merely peculiar, whether it be in car- 

 pets and wall-papers, or in books and art ! The 

 common, the average, the universal, quickened with 

 a new spirit, imbued with a vernal freshness — that 

 is the stuff of enduring works. 



One often wonders what is the secret of the vital- 

 ity of such a book as Dana's " Two Years before 

 the Mast." Each succeeding generation reads it 

 with the same pleasure. I can myself re-read it 

 every ten or a dozen years. Parkman's " Oregon 

 Trail" has much of the same perennial charm as 

 has Franklin's autobiography. 



How far perfect seriousness and good faith carry 

 in literature ! Why should they not count for just 

 as much here as in life ? They count in anything. 



