fection of literary form may be attained by a writer as passionless as Pope, and demands just as little of warm humanity for the purposes of appreciation on the part of the reader.

Although this presentively sensuous element in literature has been spoken of as if it were a thing apart from the thought and spirit, we realize that it is of the very essence of literature, and can no more be dissociated from the substance than the human body can be divorced from the mind and soul. It is that robe of "intertissued pearl and gold" that we shall always require for our noblest thoughts: the loftier the thought, the more imperative the demand for a superiority of diction marking its style and

manner.

A different condition arises when we turn to consider the representively sensuous element in literature. By this term may be understood the production or revival in the mind of the reader of a sense impression, conveyed through the agency of a literary work. Here the function of the artist is twofold. First of all, he teaches us to see. He opens bit by bit the sluice-gates that the flood of beauty may gradually find a passage into our lives. In this, the work of the artist is slow and tedious, and his power limited. He is trying to aid us in gathering together a store of sense impressions, which he can afterwards readjust and fill with life. In this last clause appears his second function, wherein he plays the part of the master stage-manager. With With memory acting as his stage-carpenter and scene-shifter, he drags forth the stored up properties, touches them with his magic wand, and transforms them into Forests of Arden or flowery meads of Bohemia or moon-steeped midsummer woods and plains of Attica. Nor is this all. He plays the alchemist and discovers the philosopher's stone. At his touch our six gray mice suddenly become prancing stallions, and our homely yellow pumpkin is changed into a coach all golden. Yet even Cinderella's fairy god-mother requires that first there be the six gray mice and the yellow pumpkin.

The boldest flight of fancy on the part of the writer is no more than a reassembling and rearranging of impressions acquired first through experience. The same truth controls the response of the reader. No word-picture, however vivid, can create in

the mind of the reader an image other than nebulous and impotent unless there is already present, acquired through experience, materials which the wand of the enchanter can readjust, fill with new life, and interpret. The sea poetry of Arnold and Tennyson must remain largely meaningless to one who has not also seen "the wild white horses foam and fret," or heard the league-long roller "climb and fall and roar rock-thwarted under bellowing caves, beneath the windy wall." No one can have any real understanding of Coleridge's Mont Blanc or Wordsworth's Snowdon unless he too has stood before some lofty peak, "companion of the morning star at dawn, and of the dawn co-herald,” and felt its awful height "utter forth God, and fill the hills with praise."

Here again, moreover, appears the principle of growth in appreciation. One may enjoy Tom Moore's rather glaring Oriental settings, or even the equally brilliant but more complex canvases of Ruskin, yet be indifferent to the beauty where the picture is more subtly presented. Closely associated with this fact is the gradation of subtlety on the part of the writer, as he seeks less and less for a direct presentment of detail and relies more and more on suggestion. The picture may be as carefully wrought a study as that exquisite miniature which Browning calls "A Face,”.

"Painted upon a background of pale gold,
Such as the early Tuscan art prefers.

Or the writer may rely more upon his reader's imagination and secure his effect with a few bold strokes, as does Tennyson in the tapestries wherewith he has draped the walls of his Palace of Art. The picture becomes most effective, however, when it is conveyed with a minimum of detail and an almost entire relying upon imagination,—provided, of course, the reader can respond to the demand on his imagination. A striking illustration of this quality appears in William Morris's picture of Guinevere facing her accusers, -the damp hair swept carelessly back from the white brow, eye and cheek aflame, the whole form eagerly intent, yet about the thin lip a hovering smile of scorn and the regal head proudly unbowed-all woman and all queen :

"But knowing now that they would have her speak,
She threw her wet hair backward from her brow,
Her hand close to her mouth touching her cheek,
As though she had had there a shameful blow.
And feeling it shameful to feel aught but shame

All through her heart, yet felt her cheek burned so
She must a little touch it."

The writer may even get his effect by a single stroke of his brush, as Henley in his Margarita Sorori:

"The Sun

Closing his benediction

Sinks, and the darkening air

Thrills with a sense of the triumphing night

Night with her train of stars

And her great gift of sleep."

Night with her train of stars

And her great gift of sleep.

In these two lines are all the mystery and splendor of night,the unmeasured and measureless vastness and peace, the far silent stars-and the great gift of sleep.

Perhaps the most notable example in English letters of conveying a sense-impression through sheer suggestion is Browning's familiar description of the song of the thrush; and well known as it is, it is hard to forbear quoting it in part:

"And after April, when May follows,

And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover

Blossoms and dewdrops- at the bent spray's edge,

Here the poet pauses to listen; and if you have ever heard the melody of the thrush, a silver flute-note sounds in your ear as it does in his. Then, as the music dies away across the fields rough with hoary dew, he takes up again his own silver song,— "That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over

Lest you should think he never could recapture

The first fine careless rapture!"

Not, however, until we come to consider the representively emotional and spiritual element in literature, do we find the most impressive application of the principle, that our appreciation is dependent upon and proportional to our personal experience.

Before there can be any genuine response to the stimulus of the poet's we must have realized in our own life the sentiment of joy or sorrow which we see there portrayed; and this response is proportional to the depth and extent of our emotional and spiritual being.

It may be true that beauty is its own excuse for being; that the work of poetic art has the same justification as the full-blown rose, the breaking wave, the stars of the summer midnight, or the Winged Victory, the Sistine Madonna, the Ninth Symphony. Yet this view merely tests its absolute worth, and not its worth to you and to me.

Now, as a matter of fact, the emotional range of a large part of mankind is extremely limited. Most lives run in a channel without great breadth or depth; constitutionally or because of the setting of their lives, most men feel only the more primitive and commonplace sentiments. Hence it is that poems conveying these simpler emotions, like those of Longfellow and Burns, make the widest appeal. As the emotion becomes loftier or more complex, there is a proportional decrease of readers, or appreciators. Most readers react to the conventional piety of Whittier's The Eternal Goodness, the mild melancholy of the Elegy, or the virile hardihood of Horatius, yet find very unreal the ecstasy of Shelley's Skylark, the longing and disappointment of the Ode to the West Wind, or the militant faith of Saul. This is only saying that man appreciates the poem as he finds in it a reflection and interpretation of life-of his own life.

Hence, too, it is that a poem which at one period of our life we read with indifference may become afterwards an enduring source of literary enjoyment. It is only after some great purifying force-either a great happiness or a great grief-has come into our life, leaving it sweet and cleansed of every stain, that we can understand the exquisite purity of Pippa's dew-drenched morning song. To know the meaning of Andrea del Sarto, we must have sat, as he, at twilight, looking a half-hour forth on Fiesole, when youth and hope and art are all toned down, and a common grayness silvers everything. There come into the lives of us all, moments when the reservoirs of being seem utterly drained of their living waters; when the dull mist closes in upon

us from all sides, blinding the sight, deadening the will, chilling the heart. Then it is that a little poem which we may have read with indifference a score of times, becomes for us pregnant with all meaning,-Rossetti's simple stanzas to The Woodspurge.

Tennyson has given us an excellent illustration of this truth in his Elaine. The great Lancelot has ridden into the simple world of the Lily Maid; he has been her knight and has suffered for her sake; she has known the supreme giving of a perfect love and a perfect service; and now he has ridden away, and the sunlight has faded from her sky.

"So in her tower alone the maiden sat:
His very shield was gone; only the case,
Her own poor work, her empty labour, left.
But still she heard him, still his picture formed
And grew between her and the pictured wall.
Then came her father, saying in low tones,
'Have comfort,' whom she greeted quietly.
Then came her brethren saying, 'Peace to thee,
Sweet sister,' whom she answered with all calm.
But when they left her to herself again,

Death, like a friend's voice from a distant field
Approaching through the darkness, called; the owls
Wailing had power upon her, and she mixt

Her fancies with the sallow-rifted glooms

Of evening, and the moanings of the wind."

As perfect as is the whole passage, the master-touch lies in two lines:

"His very shield was gone; only the case,

Her own poor work, her empty labour, left."

Who that has come back to the empty chamber which held a presence it shall hold no more, and sees here and there the little objects which knew the daily touch of the hand now vanished, but knows the fullness of Elaine's desolation?

There are, however, two facts that apparently refuse to adjust themselves to the principle herein enunciated. How, in the first case, shall we account for the frequent appreciation among youth of the more somber types of literature, portraying phases of experience that cannot have been encountered in their own lives; and, in the second place, how shall we account for the appreciation at all of the great masterpieces-the Antigones, the