our life;
and second, through learning to absorb and transmute the life that is in
books, beginning with those that stand nearest to your stage of
development. In the process of reading you will turn more and more to those
writers who have a larger mastery of life, and who, by their skill in
expressing the wisdom and beauty that they have made their own, can admit
you, when you are ready, to some share in that mastery.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL[15]

BLISS PERRY

[Footnote 15: An address delivered at the exercises held by the Cambridge
Historical Society in Sanders Theatre, Harvard University, Feb. 22, 1919,
to commemorate the centenary of Lowell's birth. By permission of Professor
Perry and of the editor of the _Harvard Graduates' Magazine_. Copyright,
1919, by _The Harvard Graduates' Magazine_.]

Two Harvard men, teachers of English in the University of North Carolina,
have recently published a new kind of textbook for undergraduates.
Abandoning the conventional survey of literary types and the examination of
literary history in the narrow sense of those words, they present a program
of ideas, the dominant ideas of successive epochs in the life of England
and America. They direct the attention of the young student, not so much to
canons of art as to noteworthy expressions of communal thought and feeling,
to the problems of self-government, of noble discipline, of ordered
liberty. The title of this book is _The Great Tradition_. The fundamental
idealism of the Anglo-Saxon race is illustrated by passages from Bacon and
Raleigh, Spenser and Shakespeare. But William Bradford, as well as Cromwell
and Milton, is chosen to represent the seventeenth-century struggle for
faith and freedom. In the eighteenth century, Washington and Jefferson and
Thomas Paine appear side by side with Burke and Burns and Wordsworth.
Shelley and Byron, Tennyson and Carlyle are here of course, but with them
are John Stuart Mill and John Bright and John Morley. There are passages
from Webster and Emerson, from Lowell and Walt Whitman and Lincoln, and
finally, from the eloquent lips of living men--from Lloyd George and Arthur
Balfour and Viscount Grey and President Wilson--there are pleas for
international honor and international justice and for a commonwealth of
free nations.

It is a magnificent story, this record of Anglo-Saxon idealism during four
hundred years. The six or seven hundred pages of the book which I have
mentioned are indeed