an artistic process, a creation in its fullness of the beautiful soul.

It appears, then, that the language of literature in the race is a perfected nature and a perfected manhood and a perfected divinity, so far as the race at the moment can see toward perfection. The life which literature builds up ideally out of the material of experience is not wholly a past life, but there mingles with it and at last controls it the life that man desires to live. Fullness of life

that fullness of action which is poured in the epic, that fullness of passion which is poured in the drama, that fullness of desire that is poured in the lyric― the life of which man knows himself capable and realizes as the opportunity and hope of life - this is the life that literature enthrones in its dream. You have heard much of the will to believe and of the desire to live: literature is made of these two, warp and woof. Race after race believes in the gods it has come to know and in the heroes it has borne, and in what it wishes to believe of divine and human experience; and the life it thus ascribes to its gods and to its own past is the life it most ardently desires to live. Literature, which records this, is thus the chief witness to the nobility, the constancy and instancy of man's effort for perfection. What wonder, then, if in his sublimest and tenderest song there steals that note of melancholy so often struck by the greatest masters in

the crisis and climax of their works, and which, when so struck, has more of the infinite in it, more of the human in it, than any other in the slowly triumphant theme!

To sum up - the language of literature is experience; the language of race-literature is race-experience, or history, the human use that the race has made of the world. The law appears to be that history in this sense is slowly transformed by a refining and spiritualizing process into an imaginative world, such as the world of mythology, chivalry or the Scriptures, and that this world in turn becomes emblematic and fades away into an expression of abstract truth. The crude beginning of the process is seen in our historical fiction; the height of it in Arthur or in Odin; the end of it in the symbolic or allegoric interpretation of even so human a book as Virgil's "Aeneid.” Human desire for the best enters into this process with such force that the record of the past slowly changes into the prophecy of the future, and out of the passing away of what was is built the dream of what shall be; so arises in race-life the creed of what man wishes to believe and the dream of the life he desires to live; this human desire for belief and for life is, in the final analysis, the principle of selection whose operation has been sketched, and on its validity rests the validity and truth of all literature.

THE TITAN MYTH

I

I propose to-night to illustrate by the specific example of the Titan Myth how it is that Greek mythology is a tongue of the imagination — a living tongue of the universal imagination of men.

The Titan Myth - I wonder what it means to you? The Titans were the earliest children of the earth, elder than the Greek gods even, and were the sons of the the Earth, their mother. You perhaps think of them as mere giants, such as Jack killed -- mediæval monsters of the kin of Beauty and the Beast. Think of them rather as majestic forms, with something of the sweep and mystery of those figures you may remember out of Ossian and his misty mountains, with the largeness and darkness of the earth in them, a massive dim-featured race, but with an earthly rather than celestial grandeur, embodiments of mighty force dull to beauty, intelligence, light. When Zeus, the then young Olympian, was born,