The
discouraged youth too naturally transfers the epithet of _dead_ from the
languages to the authors that wrote in them. What concern have we with
the shades of dialect in Homer or Theocritus, provided they speak the
spiritual _lingua franca_ that abolishes all alienage of race, and makes
whatever shore of time we land on hospitable and homelike? There is much
that is deciduous in books, but all that gives them a title to rank as
literature in the highest sense is perennial. Their vitality is the
vitality not of one or another blood or tongue, but of human nature;
their truth is not topical and transitory, but of universal acceptation;
and thus all great authors seem the coevals not only of each other, but
of whoever reads them, growing wiser with him as he grows wise, and
unlocking to him one secret after another as his own life and experience
give him the key, but on no other condition. Their meaning is absolute,
not conditional; it is a property of _theirs_, quite irrespective of
manners or creed; for the highest culture, the development of the
individual by observation, reflection, and study, leads to one result,
whether in Athens or in London. The more we know of ancient literature,
the more we are struck with its modernness, just as the more we study the
maturer dramas of Shakespeare, the more we feel his nearness in certain
primary qualities to the antique and classical.
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