what he shall say and another thought to how he shall say it. He selects
the best or most melodious words, the finest figures, and aims to make his
story or poem beautiful in itself, as a painter strives to reflect a face
or a landscape in a beautiful way. Any photographer can in a few minutes
reproduce a human face, but only an artist can by care and labor bring
forth a beautiful portrait. So any historian can write the facts of the
Battle of Gettysburg; but only a Lincoln can in noble words reveal the
beauty and immortal meaning of that mighty conflict.

To all such written works, which quicken our sense of the beautiful, and
which are as a Jacob's ladder on which we mount for higher views of nature
or humanity, we confidently give the name "literature," meaning the art of
literature in distinction from the mere craft of writing.

[Sidenote: THE PASSING AND THE PERMANENT]

Such a definition, though it cuts out the greater part of human records, is
still too broad for our purpose, and again we must limit it by a process of
exclusion. For to study almost any period of English letters is to discover
that it produced hundreds of books which served the purpose of literature,
if only for a season, by affording pleasure to readers. No sooner were they
written than Time began to winnow them over and over, giving them to all
the winds of opinion, one generation after another, till the hosts of
ephemeral works were swept aside, and only a remnant was left in the hands
of the winnower. To this remnant, books of abiding interest, on which the
years have no effect save to mellow or flavor them, we give the name of
great or enduring literature; and with these chiefly we deal in our present
study.

[Sidenote: THE QUALITY OF GREATNESS]