is the chief thing; to analyze and explain them is a less joyous but still an important matter.  Behind every book is a man; behind the man is the race; and behind the race are the natural and social environments whose influence is unconsciously reflected.  These also we must know, if the book is to speak its whole message.  In a word, we have now reached a point where we wish to understand as well as to enjoy literature; and the first step, since exact definition is impossible, is to determine some of its essential qualities.

Qualities of literature.  The first significant thing is the essentially artistic quality of all literature.  All art is the expression of life in forms of truth and beauty; or rather, it is the reflection of some truth and beauty which are in the world, but which remain unnoticed until brought to our attention by some sensitive human soul, just as the delicate curves of the shell reflect sounds and harmonies too faint to be otherwise noticed.  A hundred men may pass a hayfield and see only the sweaty toil and the windrows of dried grass; but here is one who pauses by a Roumanian meadow, where girls are making hay and singing as they work.  He looks deeper, sees truth and beauty where we see only dead grass, and he reflects what he sees in a little poem in which the hay tells its own story: 

      Yesterday’s flowers am I,
    And I have drunk my last sweet draught of dew. 
    Young maidens came and sang me to my death;
    The moon looks down and sees me in my shroud,
      The shroud of my last dew. 
    Yesterday’s flowers that are yet in me
    Must needs make way for all to-morrow’s flowers. 
    The maidens, too, that sang me to my death
    Must even so make way for all the maids
      That are to come. 
    And as my soul, so too their soul will be
    Laden with fragrance of the days gone by. 
    The maidens that to-morrow come this way
    Will not remember that I once did bloom,
    For they will only see the new-born flowers. 
    Yet will my perfume-laden soul bring back,
    As a sweet memory, to women’s hearts
        Their days of maidenhood. 
    And then they will be sorry that they came
        To sing me to my death;
    And all the butterflies will mourn for me. 
        I bear away with me
    The sunshine’s dear remembrance, and the low
        Soft murmurs of the spring. 
    My breath is sweet as children’s prattle is;
    I drank in all the whole earth’s fruitfulness,
    To make of it the fragrance of my soul
      That shall outlive my death.[1]

One who reads only that first exquisite line, “Yesterday’s flowers am I,” can never again see hay without recalling the beauty that was hidden from his eyes until the poet found it.