is recovering. My blood courses through my veins; my nerves tingle; joy
suffuses me where gloom reigned before. I cry out; I beg the bearer of
good tidings to tell them again and again; I keep him by me, so that I may
ask him a thousand questions, bringing out his message in a thousand
variant forms. But do I turn to the other and say, "O, that blessed date!
was Cromwell truly born thereon? Let me, I pray, hear you recite it again
and again!" I trow, not.

The message that we desire to hear again is the one that produces its
effect again and again; and that is the message of feeling, the message of
art--not that of mere utility. This is so true that I conceive we may use
it as a test of art-value. The great works of literature do not lose their
effect on a single reading. One makes response to them the hundredth time
as he did the first. Their appeal is so compelling that there is no
denying it--no resisting it. There are snatches of poetry--and of prose,
too--that we have by heart; that we murmur to ourselves again and again,
sure that the response which never failed will come again, thrilling the
whole organism with its pathos, uplifting us with the nobility of its
appeal, warming us with its humor. There is a little sequence of homely
verse that never fails to bring the tears to my eyes. I have tested myself
with it under the most unfavorable circumstances. In the midst of
business, amid social jollity, in the mental dullness of fatigue, I have
stopped and repeated to myself those three verses. So quickly acts the
magic of the author's skill that the earlier verses grip the fibers of my
mind and twist them in such fashion that I feel the pathos of the last
lines just as I felt them for the first time, years ago. You might all
tell similar stories. I believe that this is a characteristic of good
literature, and that all of it will bear reading, and re-reading, and
reading again.