day.

In certain respects the years do our weeding for us. In our youth we
admire the verses which answer our mood; as we grow older we like those
better which speak to our experience; at last we come to look only upon
that as poetry which appeals to that original nature in us which is
deeper than all moods and wiser than all experience. Before a man is
forty he has broken many idols, and the milestones of his intellectual
progress are the gravestones of dead and buried enthusiasms of his
dethroned gods.

There are certain books which it is necessary to read; but they are very
few. Looking at the matter from an aesthetic point of view, merely, I
should say that thus far one man had been able to use types so
universal, and to draw figures so cosmopolitan, that they are equally
true in all languages and equally acceptable to the whole Indo-European
branch, at least, of the human family. That man is Homer, and there
needs, it seems to me, no further proof of his individual existence than
this very fact of the solitary unapproachableness of the "Iliad" and the
"Odyssey." The more wonderful they are, the more likely to be the work
of one person. Nowhere is the purely natural man presented to us so
nobly and sincerely as in these poems. Not far below these I should
place the "Divina Commedia" of Dante, in which the history of the
spiritual man is sketched with equal command of material and grandeur of
outline. Don Quixote stands upon the same level, and receives the same
universal appreciation. Here we have the spiritual and the natural man
set before us in humorous contrast. In the knight and his squire
Cervantes has typified the two opposing poles of our dual nature--the
imagination and the understanding as they appear in contradiction. This
is the only comprehensive satire ever written, for it is utterly
independent of time, place, and manners. Faust gives us the natural
history of the human intellect, Mephistopheles being merely the
projected impersonation of that scepticism which is the invariable
result of a purely intellectual culture. These four books are the only
ones in which universal facts of human nature and experience are ideally
represented. They can, therefore, never be displaced. Whatever moral
significance there may be in certain episodes of the "Odyssey," the man
of the Homeric poems is essentially the man of the senses and the
understanding, to whom the other world is alien and therefore repulsive.
There