When I say that literature nourishes the soul, I implicitly refuse the
title of literature to anything in books that either directly or
indirectly promotes any worldly or practical use. Of course, what is
literature to one man may be anything but literature to another, or to the
same man under different circumstances; Virgil to the schoolboy, for
instance, is a very different thing from the Virgil of the scholar. But
whatever you read with the design of improving yourself in some
profession, or of acquiring information likely to be of advantage to you
in any pursuit or contingency, or of enabling yourself to hold your own
with other readers, or even of rendering yourself that enviable
nondescript, a person of culture,--whatever, in short, is read with any
assignable purpose whatever, is in so far not literature. The Bible may be
literature to Mr. Matthew Arnold, because he reads it for fun; but to
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.
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