Man changes the landscape. Nature changes man.

This supreme knowledge, to which all technical and special knowledge is tributary, has not come through any one faculty or to any single class of men. It has been the distillation of a vast experience, involving the senses and the emotions no less than the intellect. Only a very small part of it has been secured by deliberate and conscious thinking; much the larger and deeper part of it has to come to men and women who had no power of rationalizing it, but who could receive it and retain it.

There is a deep and beautiful significance in this fundamental instruction of humanity… 

For while life realized , embodied, and interpreted, is the first test of literature, some kind of perfection, of construction, expression, form, is the second test.

There is no greater fallacy than the idea that the soul and form of a great literary work are somehow separable, and that the form is in some way separate.

The instinct which demands beauty  of every work which claims a place in literature is sound; the insistence that the new form shall copy the old is the folly of blindness attempting to do the work of perfect vision.

In second rate-writers style may be, and often is, a matter of artifice; for this reason they remain second rate; first-rate writers it is always a matter of instinct and character, because it is always an expression of personality, and personality , is the creative principle. 

To every piece of literature humanity makes a large contribution through several channels which will be noted hereafter; the chief among them being the great and mysterious entity which we call race, and the subtle influence which we call the spirit of the age. There is also the constant and penetrating power of nature, or natural environment. But that which gives the work its stamp, as literature, is the personality of the writer.

In the true, deep sense, personality in literature is revealed, not in what is individualistic in feeling or expression, but in what is fundamentally distinctive and characteristic in a man’s work; in his view of life and art; in his structural force and genius; in the quality of his imagination; in the depth of his insight; in his sensitiveness of his temperament; in the adequacy and inevitableness of his expression.

... great men are inspired; that is breathed into by something not themselves. Call that something what we may, it is clear that it exists.

... we have a common memory, a common history, and a common consciousness...

A Hebrew he feels as by instinct his affinity with the side of life…

This peculiar fortune of great writers; they keep the strength of their race without any sacrifice of individuality.

Civilization is the joint product of man and Nature; Nature furnishing the power which man applies…  

… soul expresses itself.

An influence which at the start is purely physical becomes after a time intellectual and spiritual, for man’s nature is indivisible, and that which affects a part affects the whole.

Compounded as he was of fire and sensibility, exquisitely to the influence of the moment…

Upon every such mind the Time Spirit is a powerful influence, but the Eternal Spirit is the source of its inspiration.

To express some part or aspect of absolute truth in the speech of the day, is the task of all who express themselves powerfully through the art; the truth does not belong to the time, because truth is for all time; but the form which it shall take, the language through which it shall find expression, are largely imposed upon the artist by the age in which he lives.

A great writer must be in his age, but never entirely of it; he must preserve and utilize the genius and temper of his race, but he must subordinate them to his own personality; he must understand the spirit of his time and yet remain its master.

English prose in the hands of Raleigh, Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, Milton, Burton, Fuller, Jeremy Taylor and the other writers who were more or less under the influence of the Elizabethan period, disclosed great possibilities of eloquent and masterful expression, but lacked clearness, simplicity, flexibility; these qualities were at no man’s command until the close of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century.

... all others are insubordinate for they do not have the development of the idea of God, only Nature.

... one loses all perception of order and symmetry.

... the reports of the past...

...the mind has taken a new start and resolved to see things for itself.

Liberty always carries with it a certain license, the overflow of its powerful current; and liberty is the prime characteristic of an age of expansion.

We have lost the antique simplicity, definitiveness, and harmony, but we have gained the inexhaustible inspirations and resources of the spiritual life.

... all rests upon a spiritual need or gain and there is clear definite movement to a spiritual end.

... surely earth and heaven are not far asunder in such a verse as this.

Materialism in art reaches its limits so soon that it never really gets into the field at all.

The story of the evolution of the drama is one of the most interesting in the history of literature, and is especially worthy of study as bringing out clarity the fundamental fact that literature, in its great forms, is always a growth and not a manufacture that it is a direct product of life, and that it is a representation or interpretation of life.

The significant word with Herder was growth; because growth implies natural process as opposed to mechanical process, spontaneous impulse as distinguished from conscious action, genius as contrast with artifice, and the personality of the writer as against abstract ideas.

Everything that a man undertakes to produce, whether by action, word or in whatsoever way, ought to spring from the union of all his faculties.” In other words, a work of art is an expression of a man’s whole nature and life; something that grows out of him and not something which he puts together with mechanical dexterity.

It is an interpretation not to be pressed too far, but one which broadly expresses the fundamental truth when it declares that literature is a vital product of the soul, a comprehensive and harmonious art and, therefore a revelation of life to men.