Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ture. The other condition is that intrinsic literary value shall have its full recognition, by which particular portions of literature may be brought from most distant historic relationship into the foreground of our literary perspective. WORLD LITERATURE FROM THE ENGLISH POINT OF All that has been attempted so far has been preliminary. The purpose of this work is the practical realization of World Literature from the English point of view: actual selection of literature entering into this conception, and a grasp of the spirit in which such literature is to be approached. It is manifestly an assistance towards this purpose to have at the start something like a map of literature as a whole; only a small part of this whole can be compassed, yet at least the instinct of choice is provided with a sense of direction in which to move. As a step in the solution of our problem I wish, borrowing a term from religious phraseology, to speak of Literary Bibles. The great religions of the world rest each on its sacred books; it seems not improper to extend a word familiar in this connection to collections of works holding a somewhat analogous position in the purely literary field. In its full conception, the word "bible" combines wide range of literature with high significance of matter and some sense of literary unity; it further suggests a process of selection already accomplished by evolution, a survival of the spiritually fittest. Viewing universal literature from our English standpoint, it appears to me that five such Literary Bibles may be recognized. The first is of course the Holy Bible: this comprehends in its completeness one out of our two ancestral literatures. For the other ancestral literature, the Hellenic, we may, I think, make an approach to such representation—but on...