Luther, Calvin, or the pupils of a Sunday-school, it is essentially
something else. Literature is the written communications of the soul of
mankind with itself; it is liable to appear in the most unexpected places,
and in the oddest company; it vanishes when we would grasp it, and appears
when we look not for it. Chairs of literature are established in the great
universities, and it is literature, no doubt, that the professor
discourses; but it ceases to be literature before it reaches the student's
ear; though, again, when the same students stumble across it in the
recesses of their memory ten or twenty years later, it may have become
literature once more. Finally, literature may, upon occasion, avail a man
more than the most thorough technical information; but it will not be
because it supplements or supplants that information, but because it has
so tempered and exalted his general faculty that whatever he may do is
done more clearly and comprehensively than might otherwise be the case.

Having thus, in some measure, considered what is literature and what the
soul, let us note, further, that the literature proper to manhood is not
proper to childhood, though the reverse is not--or, at least, never ought
to be--true. In childhood, the soul and the mind act in harmony; the mind
has not become preoccupied or sophisticated by so-called useful knowledge;
it responds obediently to the soul's impulses and intuitions. Children
have no morality; they have not yet descended to the level where morality
suggests itself to them. For morality is the outcome of spiritual pride,
the most stubborn and insidious of all sins; the pride which prompts each
of us to declare himself holier than his fellows, and to support that
claim by parading his docility to the Decalogue. Docility to any set of
rules, no matter of how divine authority, so long as it is inspired by
hope of future good or present advantage, is rather worse than useless:
except our righteousness exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees,--that
is, except it be spontaneous righteousness or morality, and, therefore,