7. Importance. The importance of literature, both in its larger and its narrower sense, can hardly be over-estimated. Books are the treasure-houses, in which the intellectual riches of all past ages have been permanently stored. Literature is our principal means of acquiring a knowledge of the achievements of our race, and of rising to the highest plane of intellectual and spiritual culture. By means of literature we reach beyond the narrow limits of our own life and experience, and appropriate the best intellectual and spiritual results of all ages and all civilized peoples.