n the current of our minds strongly
towards right feeling--in the one case of duty and compassion, in the
other of purest loyalty in love.

The most vivid conception of high conduct--the one which we can least
shake off--is hardly to be gathered from the didactic moral treatise; it
is hardly ever derived from set sermons, unless the preacher impose it
upon us by some magnetism of his personality; it is more often impressed
by some literary embodiment which has been made to live and move and
have a being--by a Cordelia or a Jeanie Deans, by a Galahad or a Parson
Adams. Such embodiments as these are instruments for that which Matthew
Arnold holds to be the object of poetry, namely, the powerful and
beautiful application of "ideas to life."

But, it may be objected, the influence of a writer may indeed thus
stimulate, but what if it stimulates irrationally and amiss? Yet
herein, precisely, lies one great superiority of the study of
literature. It is the best means known to humanity of encouraging
breadth of mind, many-sidedness of comprehension. That is, of course,
with the proviso that your literary worship is not a monotheism. The
genuine literary student is not a student of one author, much less of
one book. It is true that Shakespeare is in himself almost a compendium
of humanity, and that to study Shakespeare alone is as profitable as to
study a score of less comprehensive mortals. Nevertheless, even
Shakespeare has his limitations. He could not wholly escape the
limitations of his times, spacious though these were.

Literary study in the proper sense is as wide as time and opportunity
can make it. It includes alike the _Divine Comedy_ and the human comedy.
As far as possible it ignores differences of nationality, of language,
of date. It seeks to know the best that has been thought and said in the
world, wherever and whenever. It ransacks the Hebrew mind, the Greek
mind, the Roman mind, the Italian, French, German and English mind. It
gathers opinions, suggestions, points of view, elements of culture from
all sources. If Shakespeare holds the mirror up to nature as she shows
herself in human actions and passions, Wordsworth reflects the
manifestations of her spirit as seen in her physical works. If Homer
gives us the naive and simple grandeur of pagan life, Dante gives us the
mystic grandeur of the Catholic conception, Milton the severer grandeur
of the semi-Puritan. The literary student thus approaches truth from