Sanskrit rhetoric rasa, which signifies outer juices having their response in the inner juices of our emotions. And a poem, according to it, is a sentence or sentences containing juices, which stimulate the juices of emotion. It brings to us ideas, vitalized by feelings, ready to be made into the life-stuff of our nature.
Bare information on facts is not literature, because it gives us merely the facts which are independent of ourselves. Repetition of the facts that the sun is round, water is liquid, fire is hot, would be intolerable. But a description of the beauty of the sunrise has its eternal interest for us,—because there, it is not the fact of the sunrise, but its relation to ourselves, which is the object of perennial interest.
It is said in the Upanishad, that "Wealth is dear to us, not because we desire the fact of the wealth itself, but because we desire ourselves." This means that we feel ourselves in our wealth,—and therefore we love it. The things which arouse our emotions arouse our own self-feeling. It is like our touch upon the harp-string: if it is too feeble, then we are merely aware of the touch, but if it is strong, then our touch comes back to us in tunes and our consciousness is intensified.
