conceiving that the boundaries of sense are final boundaries, that the world of matter is the world of reality, should ever be kept before them; should be devoutly and reverently studied.

Education should deepen, not lessen, the sense of the encompassing mystery of life; the teachers who can explain too much explain nothing. We know little of the 'why' of our predicament; let those studies that deepen the sense of the encompassing mystery of life hold their due place. We protest against the misleading certainties of mathematics and the illusory boundary line of organic science as circumscribing the intellectual life, not pleading to have these studies neglected, but pleading against the supremacy they have gained, and the spiritual loss resulting from this supremacy. Whatever may be the ultimate truth, we are greater than our modern training would have us know; yet we must not lose the deeper curiosity, or forego the higher questioning.

Save crucial experience, there is nothing that keeps before us this sense of vastness as does great literature, with its recognition of the unfathomable depths of the inner life. Supreme moments in the production of literature are always full of a sense of unexplained mystery; infinity with wide wings broods over it. In Greek drama, in Shakespeare and in the literature of the Renaissance, in our own early nineteenth-century poetry, there is a profound sense of wonder at the illimitable greatness of life, known and not known, dimly divined. To deepen the sense of mystery; to quicken constantly the sense of challenge; to waken in the young a need of spiritual quest-what can help more than close contact with records of spiritual achievement, the insight of great souls? Life, to be great, must be forever quick with a sense of infinite opportunity.

IV

In the name of our birthright to wider and profounder life, we protest against the narrowness, externality, lack of vision, lack of freedom of much of our educational life of to-day. The very nature of the objections brought against the study of literature is a reason why it should be taught - constantly, assiduously taught. Each objection shows the narrowing or hardening of the mind to a single track, that tendency of education that has been all but fatal to so many of the educators and the educated. Whatever education does, it should leave open all avenues out into intellectual light and space, and should discover new ones. And this study appealing to the intellect, both reason and imagination; appealing to that which is deepest in the human soul, emotion, passion - is precisely the means to keep the human mind aquiver and astir, sensitive to new meanings, quick to grasp, strong to retain, large and larger significances of this our problem of existence.

It is perhaps the only study which, presenting human experience in its wholeness, calls upon the human being in his entirety, the many-sided creature of many instincts and many impulses who nevertheless draws himself together and says 'I.' To the solving of his problems in literature, as in the large complexity of life, he must bring his every power; as it gives scope, freedom, to feeling, imaginative instinct, intellectual aspiration, so it demands their service in the matter of interpretation. We live in our emotions, as well as in intellect; in imagination, in soul, as well as in mind; feeling, the motive power, and perhaps the greater part of life, may be the impelling force to new spiritual and intellectual attainment. Study of literature keeps us aware of the larger resources of our

Now, when it becomes overwhelmingly evident that the paramount factors in civilization are those which develop human feeling and guide it aright; now, when force cruelly triumphs, it behooves us to make use of all resources that will keep feeling quick and sensitive. Losing its guidance in human affairs we lose our way; has recent history justified the sneer wherewith 'efficiency' has banished sentiment? Inasmuch as in all life there is nothing so misleading as mere intellect, unchecked by feeling, by sense of necessary adjustments, by old instincts, growing fine and sensitively aware of larger need-the deeper powers should be allowed their rightful share in education and in shaping existence. There are innumerable ways in which study of literature can minister to the greater self, of passionate aspiration, divine imaginings, and hopes that will not tarry at the sense-boundaries of things. The young must be made to feel its answer to the greater needs of life, its ministry to the inner self, to the finer hopes, the profounder faiths. They must be guided to it early, that it may answer these diviner instincts when they first waken; that they may know from what great source to draw in their spiritual hunger.

Human emotion is forever pressing on to larger life, to greater destiny; and the guide in all this further quest is that divinest faculty of the human mind, imagination, which, in its penetrative power, is in the forefront of all efforts to solve the mystery of existence. Confessedly or not, it works in science, in philosophy, in the great conjectures that may or may not later find reasoned proof; it is in all arts the guiding factor, piercing to inner meanings, and shaping in accordance with the divination. This gift, supremely necessary in

verse, in searching out the finer law, and supremely necessary in fashioning forms of loveliness, finds, perhaps, its profoundest expression in great literature. Here we find the fullest records of the deepest insight of most gifted human souls, and the fullest record of that which in human nature comes nearest the divine, creative activity working out the great meaning. Because the study of literature fosters, as perhaps no other study can, this faculty, discovers, develops, guides it, it is a supremely important part of education. The young should be taught the mastery, among the human faculties, of this power which marshals the great insights; taught, through Wordsworth, Coleridge, Ruskin, that it is the profoundest attribute of the human mind - not fancy, sporting with unrealities, but divining imagination, piercing to the very heart of things; taught not to confuse imaginative, as is often done in common parlance, with imaginary, in slighting, contemptuous reference to it as a more or less misleading mental faculty, as if it were a power leading away from reality, instead of to the soul of it. Why should this faculty, working behind all great discoveries in the outer world, be discredited to-day only in searching out the meanings of the inner life, the profoundest working of all? We have need of contact with this power which refreshes us at the very sources of being, after our forty years and more than forty years of wandering in that arid wilderness the contemplation of facts of the external world.

You cannot teach the divining power: that is admitted; but you can teach the young that this divining power of great genius is superior to reason; that, in all departments of intellectual endeavor, reason is its helpmate, its tool, which may serve, but may not master,

this creative gift. You can bring the young into contact with greatly imaginative work; in this age of alleged enlightenment, many have never heard of it! Often you can make them see deeper meanings which would otherwise have escaped them. You can help them recognize the fact that genius may and does perceive great meanings in life that lesser folk could not find without them; that it is good, at times, to forget our entire preoccupation with the minor, and seek the company of the great thinkers, the diviners of the best, whose vision sometimes contradicts the evidence of the passing show of life as absolutely as our knowledge of cosmic law contradicts the apparent rising and setting of the sun. Let us teach the young to trust the great insights, the great dreamers who have dreamed the great dream.

It is by this power of divining inner significances through the penetrative imagination, of being able to clothe these in terms of concrete beauty, that the poet becomes the great interpreter, as Sidney, Shelley, Arnold claimstimulating feeling to great ends, expressing his insight into the divine in a way that mere human beings can understand more potently than they can understand the purely intellectual appeal. Eyes have we, and ears; 'sense' may help 'soul,' and beauty comes home to the whole human being in a way that no abstract plea can command, as profound thought and passion, guided by imaginative vision, become visible and tangible in creative work. The poet is the great teacher, making the senses serve him, letting eye and ear become avenues through which great interpretations may reach the mind, so presenting his conjectures of immortal meanings in life that they may reach in many ways the mere mortal, caged in sense. ⚫

subtle shade: you will bring something to the intellectual perception of your reader, but you will not quicken his pulse, or waken his ardor, or rouse in him that creative will which is the very secret of life itself, as you will if you show him supremely well one human being in heroic moments of victory or defeat. Let him see and hear and share, and he will know as he could never know from mere telling. Herein lies the danger of the present predominance of the analytical over the synthetic in contemporary education. What further loss, what slipping backward will ensue, if this creative faculty of the imagination is further obscured by our contemporary habit of pulling apart! In that creative art, human life, mere analytic processes of intellect will not suffice; life is constant synthesis, whether we will or no, and constant combining, acting, creating are necessary for us all. When a race loses its imaginative grasp of deeper values, all crumbles; great epochs are always a time of seeing large relations, of synthesis, of faith, and action in the light of that faith. We must have constructive idealism; we must conceive life as a whole and work at it as a whole; and for this must have ever before us that which guides in creating fineness of thought and feeling, and incites thereto. Surely the best literature, soul-experience in terms of beauty, stirring emotion, guiding feeling to lovely issues no care can be too great to keep and cultivate and greatly share its high import.

V

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ways of beauty in connection with those questions that are the profoundest and the most searching, the impulses that arise from the uttermost depths of our lives. Can anything set forth as profoundly, or in such awful beauty, as does great tragedy, the clash between will and circumstance, the central fact of human existence, that we are partly bound, partly free, and that herein lies the point of our being here? No mere exposition can ever present this as can this supreme art, or so bring it home to the quivering heart and soul of youth. Tracing cause and effect, following the inevitable consequences of act and choice, you watch the working of the laws of life as presented in a great artist's conception. In Macbeth, in King Lear one can trace, as one can trace in a Gothic cathedral, the power and the delicacy, the unity of design in boundless variety. Demonstration could never achieve for us this awful nearness to human fate gained through thus partaking, step by step, of another's experience.

Again, close contact with varied expressions of emotion that have found permanent place in literature because of depth of feeling and beauty of form, - human experience at its most vivid moments crystallized, can hardly help effecting a civilizing power, a training power, a delicately suggestive potency in the matter of finer self-possession. Perfect integrity of form is in itself a matter of control; and ethical as well as æsthetic gain comes from sharing human impetuosity, patiently seeking out the ways of loveliness, searching and finding law, so that it seems not spasmodic, tangential, but gladly obedient to great laws ordering and controlling the universe. Great lyric poetry, in its passionate restraint, is a measure of growth both in depth of feeling and in its mastery, marking the upward progress from unrestrained

This discipline of letters, now more and more discredited as a part of education; the impress, the touch, the shaping power of that which is fine and high, wrought out by our predecessors: it would seem that no tongue would need to plead for this, our self-evident necessity-the profound need of all that has been wrought in beauty and in fineness to be brought to bear, in as many ways as possible, as cogently as possible, upon the young at the most susceptible age, the age when gracious ideals will most readily impress themselves. We need constantly before us, not only for our delight but for our inspiration, touchstones of thought and of feeling. The training-power in the matter of taste found in literature of achieved beauty is a necessary discipline. We need beauty, in the great sense of the word; divining loveliness of thought, shaping loveliness of form. The discipline of beauty there is none more severe, none more high, for the ways of beauty lead from visible to invisible beauty-from Spenser's Earthly Beauty, joyously hymned, to Heavenly Beauty, hymned with finer joy, where the clashing of harsh notes ceases in harmony. We need beauty, which draws all souls after, with quickened, passionate perception of values; beauty that makes available the depths of human nature, turns to fine uses feeling, emotion, powers wherein may lurk danger.

No fineness of judgment, no phases of control once won must be allowed to escape us; we must keep the ground

gained, and build upon the foundation of our forbears. Herein lies an answer to those who decry the folly of searching the literature of older days; who say that an age is sufficient unto itself; that consideration of the past insults the present. To those who look upon the old as something outworn and put away, we can but say that, in the world of spirit, the relation to us of the past is not that of discarded garments, but of feeding roots.

Those who cry without ceasing for the modern should remember that the very discovery of the evolutionary method of study involves us in greater, not less, responsibility in regard to the past than has ever rested upon the shoulders of men before, because we know, better than men have ever done, how past and present are linked in an unbroken chain. Surely they are wisest who break faith neither with past nor with future; no generation really wants to be the weak place in the chain.

This is not a plea that we linger helplessly in the old, but a plea to make it serve our need more fully than we are doing, yield up its potency, its beauty, that nothing be lost. We do not undervalue the creative work of the present; the worth of any expressed spiritual insight or inner experience cannot be gainsaid. That which comes directly, in word or written phrase, from those who walk the earth with us is a stimulus and a source of refreshment; but we must not think that, for the all too prone to turn only to young, the new, chance contact with this or that bit of contemporary literature will suffice. They must not miss the training of that earlier literature whose entirety and beauty of conception and form have given it enduring worth. There is a sanity of thought, as well as beauty of form, in that literature which survives the ages; and because of this

wise balance, it has incomparable value in training young minds. Here we do not find a yearning to startle and be startled; we find instead that great note of common understanding which distinguishes all supreme art.

The simplicity, the fundamental humanness of all things great we need to keep ever before us; among the quips and cranks, the literary and critical antics of our time, we need to turn to the great literature of old, to keep fresh the sense of achieved beauty, reminding ourselves of, and teaching the young, the great things that have been said, and the great way in which they have been said. Study of the older literature will quicken the imaginative instinct, will quicken and train feeling, and suggest high standards of beauty. Because, in earlier literature, life is conceived as essentially spiritual, not physical alone; because there the imagination works with a wholeness of conception which is lacking to-day, the young need this as they need nothing else, if the future is to fulfill the promise of the past.

The great poets have not become part of the race-experience as they should. Ignored, forgotten, save by the chosen few, they do not, to our immeasurable loss, enter into the daily life of common folk. We are so proud of our wheels that go fast; of our unparalleled housekeeping arrangements; so unabashed, amid the splendors of asphalt, electricity, and aluminum, by our intellectual and spiritual poverty; would it not be well for us to pause, if pause is possible for us, to consider our inner lack? Can we not spare some minutes from our adoration of our national materialistic god, to teach the young that it is good to be in the company of those who interpret life in terms of spirit, not in terms of material prosperity; in terms of spirit, not of flesh; in terms of beauty, whose potent