Essay: "Literature." Ralph Waldo Emerson.

One-minute review: Two types of mind inhabit England—the poetic and the practical. The poetical flows from Shakespeare. The practical concerns science from which money is produced. Bacon represents both the poet in the style of his essays and the scientist with his desire for experiment. The modern English population has lost its taste for charm, love for nature, has suppressed its imagination in its lost appreciation of literature and love for the practical.

Quote:

“Nothing comes to the book-shops but politics, travels, statistics, tabulation and engineering, and even what is called philosophy and letters is mechanical in its structure, as if inspiration had ceased, as if no vast hope, no religion, no song of joy, no wisdom, no analogy existed any more.”

Comment: An old/modern complaint. No one reads serious literature any more (2010). RayS.

American Essays. Ed. Charles B. Shaw. A Pelican Mentor Book. New York: The New American Library. 1948.