Men seem to forget that all
literature is ephemeral, and unwillingly entertain the supposition of
its utter disappearance. They deem not only letters in general, but
the best books in particular, parts of a preestablished harmony,
fatal, unalterable, and do not go behind Virgil and Dante, much less
behind Moses, Ezekiel, and St. John. But no man can be a good critic
of any book, who does not read it in a wisdom which transcends the
instructions of any book, and treats the whole extant product of the
human intellect as only one age revisable and reversible by him.
In our fidelity to the higher truth, we need not disown our
debt in our actual state of culture, in the twilights of experience
to these rude helpers. They keep alive the memory and the hope of a
better day. When we flout all particular books as initial merely, we
truly express the privilege of spiritual nature; but, alas, not the
fact and fortune of this low Massachusetts and Boston, of these
humble Junes and Decembers of mortal life. Our souls are not
self-fed, but do eat and drink of chemical water and wheat.
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