every side. He approaches it variously with Bacon, with Johnson, with
Voltaire, with Goethe, with Wordsworth, with Carlyle, with Newman. He
feels the various emotions of a hundred lyrists. Led by a score of
dramatists and novelists he sees into the complexities of human
character, motive and mood. Getting away from the narrow and biassed
bickerings, gropings, and caprices of the day, he associates with
hundreds of the best minds of the past, whose interests were altogether
outside the temporary prejudices and passions which now surround us. And
what preparation for life could surpass that of the student who has thus
taken all literature for his province? He is in reality better equipped
with practical psychology than many a professed psychologist.

The professional student of history studies history from books in which
long series of facts and their possible relations are presented in the
light in which they are seen by Mommsen or Gibbon or Macaulay or Froude.
Meanwhile the student of literature sees incidentally, but, so far as he
goes, more vividly, into the actual life of breathing men through the
legend of _Beowulf_ or the _Vision of Piers Plowman_, through Chaucer or
the _Spectator_, through Ben Jonson's _Humours_ or Horace Walpole's
Letters, through _Clarissa Harlowe_ or _Pride and Prejudice_.

I know, of course, full well one frequent consequence of the
broad-mindedness which results. I realize how promptly the unread man,
filled to the lips with the frothy spirit of his own infallibility, will
condemn him whose knowledge of men and motives makes him pause and
suspend his judgment. But what of that? Some one has said that thinking
makes you wise but weak, while action makes you narrow but strong. A
terse sentence, but one which will not bear inspection. The man of
half-lights who acts with a promptitude often disastrous, is indeed
narrow, but I deny that he is strong. He is opinionated and audacious.
Far stronger, in a more reasonable world, is the man who can withhold
his yea or nay, when neither yea nor nay happens to be the one answer
of that truth which is great and will prevail.

* * * * *

These, then, are the virtues which we claim for the study of literature.

Literature enlarges our imagination; it expands our judgment; it widens
our sympathies; it enriches the world to our eyes and minds, by
revealing to us the marvels, delights, tendernesses and suggestions
which are