is the only conservative and peacemaker; it affords the only unalterable
ground upon which all men can always meet; it unselfishly identifies or
unites us with our fellows, in contradistinction to the selfish intellect,
which individualizes us and sets each man against every other. Doubtless,
then, the soul is an amiable and desirable possession, and it would be a
pity to deprive it of so much encouragement as may be compatible with due
attention to the serious business of life. For there are moments, even in
the most active careers, when it seems agreeable to forget competition,
rivalry, jealousy; when it is a rest to think of one's self as a man
rather than a person;--moments when time and place appear impertinent, and
that most profitable which affords least palpable profit. At such seasons,
a man looks inward, or, as the American poet puts it, he loafs and invites
his soul, and then he is at a disadvantage if his soul, in consequence of
too persistent previous neglect, declines to respond to the invitation,
and remains immured in that secret place which, as years pass by, becomes
less and less accessible to so many of us.

When I say that literature nourishes the soul, I implicitly refuse the
title of literature to anything in books that either directly or
indirectly promotes any worldly or practical use. Of course, what is
literature to one man may be anything but literature to another, or to the
same man under different circumstances; Virgil to the schoolboy, for
instance, is a very different thing from the Virgil of the scholar. But
whatever you read with the design of improving yourself in some
profession, or of acquiring information likely to be of advantage to you
in any pursuit or contingency, or of enabling yourself to hold your own
with other readers, or even of rendering yourself that enviable
nondescript, a person of culture,--whatever, in short, is read with any
assignable purpose whatever, is in so far not literature. The Bible may be
literature to Mr. Matthew Arnold, because he reads it for fun; but to