The Great Poets of England. Extracted from Shepp’s Literary World (1897).

The soul, the mind, needs food and exercise just as the body does; but the food of the mind is not bread, and its exercise is not games. It feeds on visions of truth and beauty as supplied by the master word artists in literature; its exercise is to wrestle with ideas enshrined in noble books, even as Jacob wrestled all the night with the angel; and its reward is, like Jacob’s, to receive a joyful blessing at the dawn.

Sometimes a man’s physical vitality runs low, and then the doctors send him away to the mountains or the seaside. There the man soaks himself in sunshine and fills his lungs with pure air and climbs over boulders or plunges through breakers day after day; and gradually he comes to feel that he is really alive and that life is truly worth living. Similarly, when we immerse ourselves in the sea of literature and bask through lengthening hours in the invigorating sunlight of truth; when we sit with Spenser or Keats, Manzoni or Verga, upon some summit of the spirit and catch the beauty of the lowlands touched with the sunset glow; when, in other words, we give the best and get the best from books—at such moments we are vividly aware of being spiritually alive and strong, supple and vigorous.

(17)

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