Page:Columbia University Lectures on Literature (1911).djvu/24

10 writer, whether it is Aristotle, "the master of all that know," or Sophocles, who " saw life steadily and saw it whole " ; Dante, who "wandered through the realms of gloom," or Milton, the "God-given organ-voice of England." Such a friendship brings us close to a full mind and to a noble soul. And such a friendship can be had only in return for loyal service, for a « strenuous resolve to spare nothing needed for full apprecia- tion of the master's genius. A friendly familiarity with an author of cosmopolitan fame can be achieved only by wide wanderings, to and fro, here and there, in the long centuries in search of the predecessors whom he followed, the con- temporaries to whom he addressed his message, and the suc- cessors who followed the path he had been the first to tread. Wisely selected, by an honest exercise of our own taste, a single author may serve as a center of interest for the lov- ing study of a lifetime. Lowell found that his profound admiration for Dante pleasantly persuaded him to studies and explorations of which he httle dreamed when he began. A desire to understand Moliere will lead an admirer of that foremost of comic dramatists to investigate the history of comedy in Greece and Rome, in Spain and Italy, and to trace out the enduring influence of the great French playwright on the later comedy of France, England, and Germany; it -mil also tempt him into unexpected by-paths, whereby he may acquire information about topics seemingly as remote as the Jesuit methods of education, as Gassendi's revival of the atomic theories of Lucretius, and as the practice of medicine in the seventeenth century.

Closely akin to this devotion to one of the mighty masters of Literature is the concentration of our interest on a single literary masterpiece. We may prefer to fill our ears with "the surge and thunder of the Odyssey" or to recall the interlinked tales "of the golden prime of good Haroun al Raschid." We may find ample satisfaction in following the footsteps of one or another of the largely conceived cos-