impresses them. To one who has truly appreciated it, there is nothing more dreary than the usual elocutionary rendering of a poem.

Suppose a teacher were to examine a student on such a poem as Coleridge's Christabel by questioning him about it, and the student were to show that he was thoroughly acquainted with all the facts and details of the poem; there would still be no evidence of that student's susceptibility to what in the poem constitutes its mysterious charm,—none whatever. The student might be utterly destitute of such susceptibility, and yet he could just as well prepare himself to answer all the teacher's questions. A very small boy might do so, whose appreciation of poetry had not gone beyond 'How doth the little busy bee.' There might be a most susceptible literary genius in the class, who might fall below the other student in such an examination! It is quite likely that he would, for he would be chiefly occupied with the poem as a poem, and would assimilate its life without retaining a recollection of all the details, to which the other had given exclusive attention. Or suppose the poem were Gray's Elegy written in a Country Churchyard, and the student were to pass a perfectly satisfactory examination thereupon, on the basis, say, of the valuable notes in Professor Hales's Longer English Poems; what would that signify, in comparison with the reading of the poem, which would unmistakably show whether he had responded, to any extent, or not, to its sweet evening pensiveness, to the general tenor of the theme, to the moulding spirit of the whole?

That he should understand the articulating thought, all the grammatical constructions (and there are several which need to be particularly looked into), and all points to which attention is called in Professor Hales's notes, is, to be sure, important; but an examination confined to these would not be any test of his literary capacity, of his susceptibility to the poem as a poem.

In these remarks, I assume, of course, that the prime object of a literary examination should be to test not so much a student's knowingness, as his literary capacity, which means a capacity to respond to the spiritual life of a poem, or any other form of literature, in the true sense of the word 'literature.' It is its spiritual life which makes a poem a poem, whatever the thought articulation may be. The student who is capable of such response should rank higher (nobody but a Dr. Dryasdust could deny this) than the student who could answer all questions which the most prolific questioner could ask him, but who could afford no evidence, through his reading of it, that the poem was anything more to him than was a primrose to Wordsworth's 'Peter Bell.'

AS the student advances to the higher literature, he should be trained in the higher, more complex vocal functions demanded for its interpretation; he should understand, all along, in his vocal education, the relation of that education to the rendering of works of genius. He should always know what his vocal exercises are for, what relation they have to the interpreting and symbolizing of thought and feeling.

I remember a teacher who advised his scholars—I was one of them—to go out frequently into the open air and exercise their voices. And the poor fellows did go, and 'fright the isle from her propriety' with their bawling without having any conception of what they were bawling for. Their lungs were exercised thereby, but the bawling did nothing for their vocal training.

Vocal exercise must not only be physiologically intelligent, but there must always be some conception back of it which it is the aim of the exercise to realize in the voice. One may have a conception, more or less distinct, of how some very significant sentence in Shakespeare, for example, should be uttered, and yet his voice is not sufficiently obedient to his will and his feelings. He therefore has something to work after, and in time may vocally realize, to his full satisfaction, his conception; and in doing so, he has acquired some new and valuable control of his voice, which he can make use of, whenever required, in the rendering of other expressions.

A true poem is a piece of articulate music which may require to be long practised upon by the voice before all its possible significance and effectiveness be realized. But there must be an ideal back of the practice (merely to keep 'going over' the poem will not do); not, of course, an entirely distinct ideal, it may be more or less vague, but such an ideal as may be got in advance through a responsiveness to its informing life. This ideal will become more and more distinct in the course of the practice.

This is true of every form of art. The artist starts with an ideal more or less vague (but it is an ideal which motives all his work), and this ideal only gradually takes shape in the process of its realization in a picture or a statue. Composing continues to the end. The poet is still composing, still working after a fuller realization of his ideal, when he is making the last verbal change in his poem. (Note 4.) To quote from Browning's 'A Death in the Desert':