title="[13]"/> efficient life. A royal road to knowledge is expected, and travel thereon is to be unrestricted by respect either for age or for authority. His hay must always be sugared. He becomes a creature of whims, and with this creature the teacher finds his task in hand. What are the reading habits and tastes that he brings from his home, and how can the teacher best improve them?

It is clear to even a casual observer that children leave the public school without the groundwork for a course of reading either for pleasure or for profit through life. It is also clear that they will get little help in this line from places other than the public school as things now obtain. And it is equally clear that the reading habits formed before the age of fourteen years are the habits and tastes that last. If then, according to his natural gifts, the student is to be led to gather the fullest measure from the field of literature, it is the special duty and privilege of the teacher to direct that gathering. To this attempt to develop a taste for good literature, some one may raise the objection that it will not fit all children—and the objection is well taken. The appeal of literature is not universal. There are a few persons who find its counterpart in a study and appreciation of the beauties and wonders of nature. Then again there are many who, instead of taking themselves to the art of books, find pleasure in perhaps the greatest of all arts, the art of social intercourse—an art that is universal enough to reach from vagabondia to the very exclusive set. However, there is a vast class devoted to a subdued and refined domestic life, and here it is that good books will bear good fruit many fold. With this class the teacher must work. What then is to be given to the children?

Of course it is understood that we are to deal with the enduring literature of childhood, the literature of power. And it is also to be understood that reading is to be done in moderation and with care. Then again it is evident that a certain amount of reading must be prescribed and thoroughly mastered. Reading must be from what is standard down to the point of appeal, lest the point always hold the boy to the earth earthy. After a taste for onions has once been developed, little hope can be entertained of making the boy a judge of the delicate flavour of grapes—they will hang high. The teacher must assert a bit of that healthful positive authority that sets many an urchin on the right path. A limited choice from books that are classics may be given in good time. All the chords of life have been struck in great literature, and a fair knowledge and good judgment can reach almost any disposition, even the most whimsical.

The thing of first importance to be prescribed is learning classical poetry by heart until its music has taken a hold on the learner. Introduce the boy to the varied field of lyric poetry and you have put before him one of the rarest and most abiding pleasures of life. Here his troubled heart may always find consolation. Nothing will bring him to a sense of his own personality with such a deft touch as a perfect lyric coming to him through his own voice. The next thing to look to is a right that is a fixed right of childhood and one that it is positively vicious to suppress, the right to the land of fairy life. A free range here will be meat and drink to any boy. Much sordidness and much selfishness in old age come to the man or woman who has not a cultivated imagination. Logic and cold facts are of precious little value in the fireside life of a family. The best things of that life are not reasoned out; but they are felt out and wondered out. Again, the great field of mythology that is so fundamentally linked to that of literature, and that is a capital mark of culture, should be open to the boy that he may roam about and wonder at its mysteries. Then he may as certainly come to own an "Age of Fable" as he must own a "Golden Treasury." And what a pair are these!

From these three fields the step will be to a knowledge and classification of books and their authors, what books to own, and how to take care of them. And to this working grasp of poetry and stories may be added a little of what is possible in history, biography, and personal essay. In this age of cheap and spurious book-making the reader must know standard editions without abridged and garbled texts. Even editors of hymn books do not hesitate to mutilate great hymns to suit their particular notions. This freedom may be a form of that exaggerated idea of personal privilege that was the gift of democracy in the past century. A good knowledge of fables and proverbial wisdom will certainly temper that notion. Such are some of the things that might be prescribed by the teacher and learned by the student. The field as thus given is limited, but the friends therein are dear friends. Nor are they to be exchanged for the new friends that may come through the advertising appeal, founded on the unsubstantial instinct for constant variety.

If enough idea of authority can ever be driven into the head of the American boy to put him into the attitude of a willing learner, good things may be looked for in habits of reading—provided the teacher be equal to the responsible task that is laid upon him. The habits of reading that measure the use of spare time, and in that way the character of the individual, will work for a more sane and less showy home life and through that for a community given to other than obtrusive and frivolous social life. What bundle of habits will serve its slave better than will this bundle? Or where is keener and more subdued pleasure to be found? Though books are a bloodless substitute for life, as Stevenson has well pointed out, we need some substitute in our hours of ease, and a good book does passing well for such a substitute; and this is especially true if the book be our favourite from the wonderful Waverley series and with it we can square about to the fire, snuff the candle, and let the rest of the world go spin.

CHAPTER III

The teacher who is a workman skilled in his craft looks upon a few educational practices as being of intrinsic merit—through and through in an age of veneer and cheap imitation. Of these practices the one most fruitful under cultivation, when done with care and in moderation, is that of learning good poetry by heart. The sense of having truly learned a thing by heart, of having completely mastered it, is a most pleasant sense to have. And when the thing learned is one of the many perfect lyrics from the field of English poetry, a far-sighted judge who has lived and considered what is of most value to the individual is led to say: That is well and good. In some mysterious way this possession of a few choice poems makes for a rarer personality and gives that touch which can come only through a perfect work of art. By sheer force of intellect a man may become a cold, designing man of action and set plans on foot for the time being; but the power that is back of all great movements for civilization and culture is one that is grounded in feeling and constructive imagination. The proverbial songs of a nation are a greater force than are its laws. In one of his most entertaining essays, De Quincey points out that, when the intellect sets itself up in opposition to the feelings, one should always trust to the feelings. Normal instincts are worth more than