and
resource. There is a sufficiently "practical" outcome of literary study
if it makes the man wiser in himself, if it makes him truer in his
judgment, richer and broader in his feelings, makes him put forth
antennae of tact and sympathy, if also it supplies him with such inward
resources that he can dispense with unattainable luxuries or with vulgar
methods of passing his time. Such results are surely a profoundly useful
application of the results of study to life.

Take a human being in the loneliness--the absolute isolation or the
intellectual isolation--of the bush; take one who is disabled by illness
or disease; take one who is perforce environed all his days by company
which is ignoble and dull; take one who can ill afford any of the
distractions of the wealthy. How shall he keep alive his higher part, or
fill his leisure with contentment and delight, except by constant
intercourse with the mightiest minds in the history of the thinking
world? Said Rousseau: "Let one destine my pupil to the army, to the
church, the bar, or anything else; yet, before his parents have chosen
his vocation, nature has called him to the vocation of human life;
living is the trade I want to teach him." All the rest is but means to
an end. "We live," asserts the poet, "by admiration, hope, and love."
And nothing can stimulate these sensations like great literature.

* * * * *

In this connexion I must insist for a few minutes upon the relations of
literature to the intellectual idol of to-day--to wit science--science
in the popular, if inaccurate, sense. I have to maintain that
literature--and particularly poetry--is the indispensable ally and
complement of science; that it is, in the end, the means by which the
essential truths of science will reach their application to life; that
it supplies the force by which the great facts of science are made to
operate for good upon our thinking and our feeling. Literature supplies
that which science alone cannot supply.

I am aware there are those who fancy that science itself is sufficient
guide and equipment for human existence. Huxley, if I remember rightly,
asserted in his nonage that science would even afford us a newer and
more enlightened morality. But I have never heard any scientist repeat
that doctrine; I have never heard any scientist claim that the altruism
of the Sermon on the Mount or of Buddha had been superseded by the dry
light of scientific con