to the laws of political economy, and to discoveries in science, and to financial contrivances; so it is that in the life of generations of men, considered from an ethical and not from a religious point of view, the most potent and lasting influence for a civilization that is worth anything, a civilization that does not by its own nature work its decay, is that which I call literature.  It is time to define what we mean by literature.  We may arrive at the meaning by the definition of exclusion.  We do not mean all books, but some books; not all that is written and published, but only a small part of it.  We do not mean books of law, of theology, of politics, of science, of medicine, and not necessarily books of travel, or adventure, or biography, or fiction even.  These may all be ephemeral in their nature.  The term belles-lettres does not fully express it, for it is too narrow.  In books of law, theology, politics, medicine, science, travel, adventure, biography, philosophy, and fiction there may be passages that possess, or the whole contents may possess, that quality which comes within our meaning of literature.  It must have in it something of the enduring and the universal.  When we use the term art, we do not mean the arts; we are indicating a quality that may be in any of the arts.  In art and literature we require not only an expression of the facts in nature and in human life, but of feeling, thought, emotion.  There must be an appeal to the universal in the race.  It is, for example, impossible for a Christian today to understand what the religious system of the Egyptians of three thousand years ago was to the Egyptian mind, or to grasp the idea conveyed to a Chinaman’s thought in the phrase, “the worship of the principle of heaven”; but the Christian of today comprehends perfectly the letters of an Egyptian scribe in the time of Thotmes III., who described the comical miseries of his campaign with as clear an appeal to universal human nature as Horace used in his ‘Iter Brundusium;’ and the maxims of Confucius are as comprehensible as the bitter-sweetness of Thomas a Kempis.  De Quincey distinguishes between the literature of knowledge and the literature of power.  The definition is not exact; but we may say that the one is a statement of what is known, the other is an emanation from the man himself; or that one may add to the sum of human knowledge, and the other addresses itself to a higher want in human nature than the want of knowledge.  We select and set aside as literature that which is original, the product of what we call genius.  As I have said, the subject of a production does not always determine the desired quality which makes it literature.  A biography may contain all the facts in regard to a man and his character, arranged in an orderly and comprehensible manner, and yet not be literature; but it may be so written, like Plutarch’s Lives or Defoe’s account of Robinson Crusoe, that it is literature, and of imperishable value as