the past are often slighted or ignored.
The supreme masters of an art ought
to be the objects of constant study
and thought; there is more of life,
truth, and beauty in them than in
their fellow-artists of narrower range
of experience and artistic achievement.
For this reason these greatest inter-
preters of the human spirit are in no
sense exclusively of the past; they
are of the present and the future.
To know them is not only to know
the particular periods in which they
wrote, but to know our own period
in the deepest sense. No man can
better prepare himself to enter into
the formative life of his time than by
thoroughly familiarising himself with
the greatest books of the past; for in
these are revealed, not the secrets of
past forms of life, but the secrets of
that spirit whose historic life is one

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v?