I have now reached, not indeed the end of my subject, which I have scarcely begun, but the limits inexorably set by the circumstances under which it is treated.  Yet I am unwilling to conclude without meeting an objection to my method of dealing with it, which has I am sure been present to the minds of not a few who have been good enough to listen to me with patience.  It will be said that I have ignored the higher functions of literature; that I have degraded it from its rightful place, by discussing only certain ways in which it may minister to the entertainment of an idle hour, leaving wholly out of sight its contributions to what Mr. Harrison calls our “spiritual sustenance.”  Now, this is partly because the first of these topics and not the second was the avowed subject of my address; but it is partly because I am deliberately of opinion that it is the pleasures and not the profits, spiritual or temporal, of literature which most require to be preached in the ear of the ordinary reader.  I hold indeed the faith that all such pleasures minister to the development of much that is best in man—­mental and moral; but the charm is broken and the object lost if the remote consequence is consciously pursued to the exclusion of the immediate end.  It will not, I suppose, be denied that the beauties of nature are at least as well qualified to minister to our higher needs as are the beauties of literature.  Yet we do not say we are going to walk to the top of such and such a hill in order to drink in “spiritual sustenance.”  We say we are going to look at the view.  And I am convinced that this, which is the natural and simple way of considering literature as well as nature, is also the true way.  The habit of always requiring some reward for knowledge beyond the knowledge itself, be that reward some material prize or be it what is vaguely called self-improvement, is one with which I confess I have little sympathy, fostered though it is by the whole scheme of our modern education.  Do not suppose that I desire the impossible.  I would not if I could destroy the examination system.  But there are times, I confess, when I feel tempted somewhat to vary the prayer of the poet, and to ask whether Heaven has not reserved, in pity to this much-educating generation, some peaceful desert of literature as yet unclaimed by the crammer or the coach; where it might be possible for the student to wander, even perhaps to stray, at his own pleasure without finding every beauty labeled, every difficulty engineered, every nook surveyed, and a professional cicerone standing at every corner to guide each succeeding traveler along the same well-worn round.  If such a wish were granted, I would further ask that the domain of knowledge thus “neutralized” should be the literature of our own country.  I grant to the full that the systematic study of some literature must be a principal element in the education of youth.  But why should that literature be our own?  Why should we brush off the bloom and freshness