signifi-cance.
Still more impressive is the continued fertility of a force that lacks the highest elements of creative power. Here is no monumental literature, dependent on pyramid, tomb, or temple to hoard it up for ages beyond its natural life: the record is trusted to tissues whose evanescence is as close as possible to that of the spoken word. Its circulation, for all it seems to lack ethereal qualities, has grown wider and swifter with time, and it has freely assimilated with all social elements. It is the literature of a race still pregnant, in full possession of its peculiar gifts and its past achievements. After forty centuries of a strange experience, it has opened out from unpromising shells of graphic art and the stranger speech of three hundred millions of living souls upon the latest civilization of the globe, like the apparition of a fresh zone of continents, or of a planetary race : to us a new attitude of man ; a new form of genius, a type deficient in the qualities hitherto held by our traditional culture to be indispensable, yet coinciding with a tendency that is now assuming large proportions in the Occidental mind; an unsolicited comment thereon, enhanced by its age, its mass, its variety, its historical weight, and, we may add, its orderly structure and normal growth.
Resources.
The time has obviously not come for a thorough study of the colossal theme ; but the resources already at our command comprise, beyond question, its most typical forms and forces. It would be from our purpose, were it in our power, to enter into the elaborate catalogues and critical analyses of Wylie and Schott. No such items could yield any definite idea of the spirit of this race of penmen ; though the mere list of titles and divisions of books we cannot yet read leave a vague sense of immensity and variety not without its charm or its use. Suffice it here to say of the whole that this cabala of signs is a perfect die by which the whole land and people
