In certain respects the years do our weeding for us.  In our youth we admire the verses which answer our mood; as we grow older we like those better which speak to our experience; at last we come to look only upon that as poetry which appeals to that original nature in us which is deeper than all moods and wiser than all experience.  Before a man is forty he has broken many idols, and the milestones of his intellectual progress are the gravestones of dead and buried enthusiasms of his dethroned gods.

There are certain books which it is necessary to read; but they are very few.  Looking at the matter from an aesthetic point of view, merely, I should say that thus far one man had been able to use types so universal, and to draw figures so cosmopolitan, that they are equally true in all languages and equally acceptable to the whole Indo-European branch, at least, of the human family.  That man is Homer, and there needs, it seems to me, no further proof of his individual existence than this very fact of the solitary unapproachableness of the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey.”  The more wonderful they are, the more likely to be the work of one person.  Nowhere is the purely natural man presented to us so nobly and sincerely as in these poems.  Not far below these I should place the “Divina Commedia” of Dante, in which the history of the spiritual man is sketched with equal command of material and grandeur of outline.  Don Quixote stands upon the same level, and receives the same universal appreciation.  Here we have the spiritual and the natural man set before us in humorous contrast.  In the knight and his squire Cervantes has typified the two opposing poles of our dual nature—­the imagination and the understanding as they appear in contradiction.  This is the only comprehensive satire ever written, for it is utterly independent of time, place, and manners.  Faust gives us the natural history of the human intellect, Mephistopheles being merely the projected impersonation of that scepticism which is the invariable result of a purely intellectual culture.  These four books are the only ones in which universal facts of human nature and experience are ideally represented.  They can, therefore, never be displaced.  Whatever moral significance there may be in certain episodes of the “Odyssey,” the man of the Homeric poems is essentially the man of the senses and the understanding, to whom the other world is alien and therefore repulsive.  There is nothing that demonstrates this more clearly, as there is nothing, in my judgment, more touching and picturesque in all poetry, than that passage in the eleventh book of the “Odyssey,” where the shade of Achilles tells Ulysses that he would rather be the poorest shepherd-boy on a Grecian hill than king over the unsubstantial shades of Hades.  Dante’s poem, on the other hand, sets forth the passage of man from the world of sense to that of spirit; in other words, his moral conversion.  It is Dante relating his experience in the great camp-meeting