View English article handwriting worksheet - Xueyuqu Chinese Character Handwriting

Xueyuqu Edit

Total Page(s)

U4Reading

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

U4Reading

qualities.
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

U4Reading

two, is its permanence. To achieve this, it should
contain two elements: universal interest and personal
style. Good 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)

X本字帖的分享二维码

Loading font file...
The font file is large, please be patient