the motley printed sheets, we grasp the life of the spirit, akin or foreign to ourselves. The book is, perhaps, the most complicated and mightiest of all the miracles created by man on his path to the happiness and power of the future.
There is no one universal literature, for there is yet no language common to all, but all literary creation, in prose and poetry, is saturated with the unity of feelings, thoughts, ideals shared by all men, with the unity of man's sacred aspiration towards the joy of the freedom of the spirit, with the unity of man's disgust at the miseries of life, the unity of his hopes of the possibility of higher forms of life, and with the universal thirst for something indefinable in word or thought, hardly to be grasped by feeling, that mysterious something to which we give the pale name of beauty, and which comes to an ever brighter and more joyous flower in the world, in our own hearts.
Whatever may be the inward differences of nations, races, individualities, however distinct may be the external forms of states, religious conceptions and customs, however irreconcilable the conflict of classes—over all these differences, created by ourselves through centuries, hovers the dark and menacing spectre of the universal consciousness of the tragic quality of life and the poignant sense of the loneliness of man in the world.
Rising from the mystery of birth, we plunge into the mystery of death. Together with our planet we have been thrown into incomprehensible space. We call it the Universe, but we have no precise conception of it, and our loneliness in it has such an ironical perfection that we have nothing with which to compare it.
The loneliness of man in the Universe and on the earth, which is to many "a desert, alas! not unpeopled"—on earth amid the most tormenting contradiction of desires and possibilities—is realized only by few. But the faint feeling of it
