nd the Book_. Meanwhile its outward vesture is
full of art and beauty.

And without going further we ask, how can one stand in habitual
communion with wise, seminal and impressive speech; how can one
saturate oneself with its wisdom and energy, without being the better
equipped for the demands of both the life within and the life without?
"Consider," says Emerson, "what you have in the smallest chosen library.
A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all
civil countries have set in their best order the results of their wisdom
and learning." Well, let us keep company like that, and what is the
result? The value of great literature is that it conveys an endless
number of eternal truths for the use and enrichment of human life:
moreover it conveys them by a medium of language of such peculiar power
and beauty that those truths penetrate keenly into the heart and brain,
and, at least in some measure, and often in very large measure, they
find a fixed and perennial lodgment there. They enter the blood which
reddens our whole mental complexion.

* * * * *

This is true of literature in general, but, though the wisdom and the
wit and the passion are found in both prose and verse, the crowning form
of literature--and that which all literary societies inevitably study
most--is great poetry. The supreme mastery and our supreme interest lie
with Dante or Shakespeare or Goethe. It is astounding how commonly the
function and the brain power of the great poet are misconceived and
underrated. The supreme poets are no dainty or fragile sentimentalists;
in reality they are the very flower of human penetration. Not because
they write in splendid verse. That, indeed, is the appropriate vehicle
of their power; the harmonies and melodies of verse represent and
reproduce the tone and colour vibrations of their singularly rich
natures; but verse is only their vehicle. These great writers are
supreme, not for this versification, however magnificent, but because
that utterance of theirs is the voice of the seer, the voice of a
marvellous insight into vital truths, of a sane and ripe philosophy of
life, of a wide and profound sympathy with the myriad thoughts and
emotions of mankind. They write in verse simply because, as Hazlitt
describes it, poetry is "the most vivid form of expression that can be
given to our conception of anything." They write in verse because Nature
herself insis