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The wonder of literature
A child and a man were walking on the beach when the child
found a shell and held it to his ear. Suddenly he heard
strange, low, musical sounds. These sounds seemed to be
from another world and the child listened to them with
wonder. Then the man explained that the child heard
nothing strange, and that the shell caught a range of
sounds too faint for human ears. What amazed the child was
not a new world, but the unnoticed music of the old.
Some such experience as this lies in store for us when we
begin the study of literature. Let a little song appeal to
the ear, or a great book to the heart, and we discover a
new world, a world of dreams and magic. To enter and enjoy
this new world, we need to love literature, and make an
effort to explain it. Behind every book is a man, behind
the man is the race, and behind the race are the natural
and social environments. We must know all these, if the
book is to speak its whole message. In a word, we have now
reached a point where we wish to enjoy and understand
literature. The first step is to determine some of its
significant qualities.

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The first quality of literature is its description of
truth and beauty. Some truth and beauty remain unnoticed
until a sensitive human soul brings them to our attention,
just as the shell reflects the unnoticed sounds. A hundred
men may pass a field and see only dead grass; but a poet
stops, looks deeper, sees truth and beauty, and writes,
“Yesterday's flowers am I.” One who reads it is
capable of seeing the beauty that was hidden from his eyes
before.
The second quality of literature is its appeal to our
feelings and imagination. Its attraction lies more in what
it awakens in us than what it says. When Christopher
Marlowe's Doctor Faustus asks in the presence of Helen,
“Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?” he
opens a door through which our imagination enters a new
world, a world of love, beauty and heroism.
The third quality of literature, coming out of the other
two, is its permanence. To achieve this, it should contain
two elements: universal interest and personal style. Good

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literature reflects the most basic of human nature—love
and hate, joy and sadness, fear and hope. It also takes on
a personal style—no writer can describe human life
without reflecting his own life and experiences.
In summary, literature is the expression of life in forms
of truth and beauty, the written record of man's thoughts
and feelings, and the history of the human soul.
(Adapted from William J. Long's English Literature: Its
History and Its Significance for the Life of the
English-Speaking World)

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