hundred-fold, to congregate men in
masses so that all their energies shall be taxed to bring food to
themselves, to stimulate industries, drag coal and metal from the bowels
of the earth, cover its surface with rails for swift-running carriages,
to build ever larger palaces, warehouses, ships. This gigantic
achievement strikes the imagination.

If the world in which you live happens to be the world of books, if your
pursuit is to know what has been done and said in the world, to the end
that your own conception of the value of life may be enlarged, and that
better things may be done and said hereafter, this world and this pursuit
assume supreme importance in your mind. But you can in a moment place
yourself in relations--you have not to go far, perhaps only to speak to
your next neighbor--where the very existence of your world is scarcely
recognized. All that has seemed to you of supreme importance is ignored.
You have entered a world that is called practical, where the things that
we have been speaking of are done; you have interest in it and sympathy
with it, because your scheme of life embraces the development of ideas
into actions; but these men of realities have only the smallest
conception of the world that seems to you of the highest importance; and,
further, they have no idea that they owe anything to it, that it has ever
influenced their lives or can add anything to them. And it may chance
that you have, for the moment, a sense of insignificance in the small
part you are playing in the drama going forward. Go out of your library,
out of the small circle of people who talk of books, who are engaged in
research, whose liveliest interest is in the progress of ideas, in the
expression of thought and emotion that is in literature; go out of this
atmosphere into a region where it does not exist, it may be into a place
given up to commerce and exchange, or to manufacturing, or to the
development of certain other industries, such as mining, or the pursuit
of office--which is sometimes called politics. You will speedily be aware
how completely apart from human life literature is held to be, how few
people regard it seriously as a necessary element in life, as anything
more than an amusement or a vexation. I have in mind a mountain district,
stripped, scarred, and blackened by the ruthless lumbermen, ravished of
its forest wealth; divested of its beauty, which has recently become the
field of vast coal-mining operations.