he first edition of "Leaves of Grass"
appeared in 1855, with the remarkable preface here printed. During the
war he acted as a volunteer nurse in the army hospitals, and, when it
closed, he became a clerk in the government service at Washington. He
continued to write almost till his death.]

INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE. (1863)[A]

I

History, within a hundred years in Germany, and within sixty years
in France, has undergone a transformation owing to a study of
literatures.

The discovery has been made that a literary work is not a mere play
of the imagination, the isolated caprice of an excited brain, but
a transcript of contemporary manners and customs and the sign of a
particular state of intellect. The conclusion derived from this is
that, through literary monuments, we can retrace the way in which men
felt and thought many centuries ago. This method has been tried and
found successful.

We have meditated over these ways of feeling and thinking and have
accepted them as facts of prime significance. We have found that they
were dependent on most important events, that they explain these, and
that these explain them, and that henceforth it was necessary to give
them their place in history, and one of the highest. This place has
been assigned to them, and hence all is changed in history--the aim,
the method, the instrumentalities, and the conceptions of laws and of
causes. It is this change as now going on, and which must continue to
go on, that is here attempted to be set forth.

On turning over the large stiff pages of a folio volume, or the yellow
leaves of a manuscript, in short, a poem, a code of laws, a confession
of faith, what is your first comment? You say to yourself that the
work before you is not of its own creation. It is simply a mold like
a fossil shell, an imprint similar to one of those forms embedded in
a stone by an animal which once lived and perished. Beneath the shell
was an animal and behind the document there was a man. Why do you
study the shell unless to form some idea of the animal? In the same
way do you study the document in order to comprehend the man; both
shell and document are dead fragments and of value only as indications
of the complete living being. The aim is to reach this being; this is
what you strive to reconstruct. It is a mistake to study the document
as if it existed alone by itself. That is treating things mer