Such books may have but a restricted circulation and limited esteem in
their own day, and may afterwards extend both their fame and the circle
of their readers. Others of the best books, written with a pathos and a
power that may be universally felt, appeal at once to the common
humanity of the world, and get a response marvellously strong and
immediate. An ordinary human eye and heart, whose glances are true,
whose pulses healthy, will fit us to say of much that we read--This is
good, that is poor. But only the educated eye and the experienced heart
will fit us to judge of what relates to matters veiled from ordinary
observation, and belonging to the profounder region of human thought and
emotion. Powers, however, that the few only possess, may be required to
paint what everybody can see, so that everybody shall say, How
beautiful! how like! And powers adequate to do this in the finest manner
will be often adequate to do much more--may produce, indeed, books or
pictures, whose singular merit only the few shall perceive, and the many
for awhile deny, and books or pictures which, while they give an
immediate and pure pleasure to the common eye, shall give a far fuller
and finer pleasure to that eye that is the organ of a deeper and more
cultivated soul.
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