A child and a man were walking on the beach when the child found a shell and held it to his ear.Suddenly he heard strange, low, musical sounds.These sounds seemed to he from another world and the child listened to them with wonder.Then the man explained that the child heard nothing strange, and that the shell caught a range of sounds too faint for human ears.What amazed the child was not a new world, but the unnoticed music of the old.Some such experience as this lies in store for us when we begin the study of literature.Let a little song appeal to the ear, or a great book to the heart, and we discover a new world, a world of dreams and magic.To enter and enjoy this new world, we need to love literature, and make an effort to explain it.Behind every book is a man, behind the man is the race, and behind the race are the natural and social environments.We must know all these, if the book is to speak its whole message.In a word, we have now reached a point where we wish to enjoy and understand literature.The first step is to determine some of its significant qualities.