The object in studying literature.  Aside from the pleasure of reading, of entering into a new world and having our imagination quickened, the study of literature has one definite object, and that is to know men.  Now man is ever a dual creature; he has an outward and an inner nature; he is not only a doer of deeds, but a dreamer of dreams; and to know him, the man of any age, we must search deeper than his history.  History records his deeds, his outward acts largely; but every great act springs from an ideal, and to understand this we must read his literature, where we find his ideals recorded.  When we read a history of the Anglo-Saxons, for instance, we learn that they were sea rovers, pirates, explorers, great eaters and drinkers; and we know something of their hovels and habits, and the lands which they harried and plundered.  All that is interesting; but it does not tell us what most we want to know about these old ancestors of ours,—­not only what they did, but what they thought and felt; how they looked on life and death; what they loved, what they feared, and what they reverenced in God and man.  Then we turn from history to the literature which they themselves produced, and instantly we become acquainted.  These hardy people were not simply fighters and freebooters; they were men like ourselves; their emotions awaken instant response in the souls of their descendants.  At the words of their gleemen we thrill again to their wild love of freedom and the open sea; we grow tender at their love of home, and patriotic at their deathless loyalty to their chief, whom they chose for themselves and hoisted on their shields in symbol of his leadership.  Once more we grow respectful in the presence of pure womanhood, or melancholy before the sorrows and problems of life, or humbly confident, looking up to the God whom they dared to call the Allfather.  All these and many more intensely real emotions pass through our souls as we read the few shining fragments of verses that the jealous ages have left us.

It is so with any age or people.  To understand them we must read not simply their history, which records their deeds, but their literature, which records the dreams that made their deeds possible.  So Aristotle was profoundly right when he said that “poetry is more serious and philosophical than history”; and Goethe, when he explained literature as “the humanization of the whole world.”

Importance of literature.  It is a curious and prevalent opinion that literature, like all art, is a mere play of imagination, pleasing enough, like a new novel, but without any serious or practical importance.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  Literature preserves the ideals of a people; and ideals—­love, faith, duty, friendship, freedom, reverence—­are the part of human life most worthy of preservation.  The Greeks were a marvelous people; yet of all their mighty works we cherish only a few ideals,—­ideals of