beauty in perishable stone, and ideals of truth in imperishable prose and poetry.  It was simply the ideals of the Greeks and Hebrews and Romans, preserved in their literature, which made them what they were, and which determined their value to future generations.  Our democracy, the boast of all English-speaking nations, is a dream; not the doubtful and sometimes disheartening spectacle presented in our legislative halls, but the lovely and immortal ideal of a free and equal manhood, preserved as a most precious heritage in every great literature from the Greeks to the Anglo-Saxons.  All our arts, our sciences, even our inventions are founded squarely upon ideals; for under every invention is still the dream of Beowulf, that man may overcome the forces of nature; and the foundation of all our sciences and discoveries is the immortal dream that men “shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”

In a word, our whole civilization, our freedom, our progress, our homes, our religion, rest solidly upon ideals for their foundation.  Nothing but an ideal ever endures upon earth.  It is therefore impossible to overestimate the practical importance of literature, which preserves these ideals from fathers to sons, while men, cities, governments, civilizations, vanish from the face of the earth.  It is only when we remember this that we appreciate the action of the devout Mussulman, who picks up and carefully preserves every scrap of paper on which words are written, because the scrap may perchance contain the name of Allah, and the ideal is too enormously important to be neglected or lost.

Summary of the subject.  We are now ready, if not to define, at least to understand a little more clearly the object of our present study.  Literature is the expression of life in words of truth and beauty; it is the written record of man’s spirit, of his thoughts, emotions, aspirations; it is the history, and the only history, of the human soul.  It is characterized by its artistic, its suggestive, its permanent qualities.  Its two tests are its universal interest and its personal style.  Its object, aside from the delight it gives us, is to know man, that is, the soul of man rather than his actions; and since it preserves to the race the ideals upon which all our civilization is founded, it is one of the most important and delightful subjects that can occupy the human mind.

Bibliography. (Note.  Each chapter in this book includes a special bibliography of historical and literary works, selections for reading, chronology, etc.; and a general bibliography of texts, helps, and reference books will be found at the end.  The following books, which are among the best of their kind, are intended to help the student to a better appreciation of literature and to a better knowledge of literary criticism.)

GENERAL WORKS.  Woodberry’s Appreciation of Literature (Baker & Taylor Co.); Gates’s Studies in Appreciation (Macmillan); Bates’s Talks on the Study of Literature (Houghton, Mifflin); Worsfold’s On the Exercise of Judgment in Literature (Dent); Harrison’s The Choice of Books (Macmillan); Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, Part I; Matthew Arnold’s Essays in Criticism.