companions to a child, and teach him to love their companionship, is one of the most hopeful things in education. The boy or girl who reads some of our choice epics, stories, novels, dramas, and biographies, allowing the mind to ponder upon the problems of conduct involved, will receive many deep and permanent moral lessons. The realism with which the artist clothes his characters only strengthens the effect and makes them lasting food for thought in the coming years. Even in early childhood we are able to detect what is noble and debasing in conduct as thus graphically and naturally revealed, and a child forms an unerring judgment along moral lines. The best influence that literature has to bestow, therefore, may produce its effect early in tender years, where impressions are deep and permanent. There are many other elements of lasting culture-value in the study of literature, but first of all the deep and permanent truths taught by the classics are those of human life and conduct.

George Willis Cooke gives clear and simple expression to the ethical force in poetry ("Poets and Problems," p. 46):—

"True poetry is for instruction as much as for pleasure, though it inculcate no formal lessons. Right moral teaching is by example far more than by precept; and the real poet teaches through the higher purpose he arouses, by the stimulus he gives, and by the purer motive he awakens. He gives no precept to recite, no homilies to con over, no rules for formal repetition; but he gives the spirit of life and the impulse of true activity. An infallible test of the great poet is that he inspires us with a sense of the richness and grandeur of life."

Rooted in the genuine realism of social life, moral ideas are still more strongly energized by feeling and even by passion. It is doubtful if moral ideas have any roots that do not reach down into deep and genuine feeling.

Ruskin, in "Sesame and Lilies," speaks to the point.

"Having then faithfully listened to the great teachers, that you may enter into their Thoughts, you have yet this higher advance to make,—you have to enter into their Hearts. As you go to them first for clear sight, so you must stay with them that you may share at last their just and mighty Passion. Passion, or "sensation." I am not afraid of the word; still less of the thing. You have heard many outcries against sensation lately; but, I can tell you, it is not less sensation we want, but more. The ennobling difference between one man and another—between one animal and another—is precisely in this, that one feels more than another. If we were sponges, perhaps sensation might not be easily got for us; if we were earthworms, liable at every instant to be cut in two by the spade, perhaps too much sensation might not be good for us. But, being human creatures, it is good for us; nay, we are only human in so far as we are sensitive, and our honor is precisely in proportion to our passion.

"You know I said of that great and pure society of the dead, that it would allow 'no vain or vulgar person to enter there.' What do you think I meant by a 'vulgar' person? What do you yourselves mean by 'vulgarity'? You will find it a fruitful subject of thought; but, briefly, the essence of all vulgarity lies in want of sensation. Simple and innocent vulgarity is merely an untrained and undeveloped bluntness of body and mind; but in true inbred vulgarity, there is a deathful callousness, which, in extremity, becomes capable of every sort of bestial habit and crime, without fear, without pleasure, without horror, and without pity. It is in the blunt hand and the dead heart, in the diseased habit, in the hardened conscience, that men become vulgar; they are forever vulgar, precisely in proportion as they are incapable of sympathy,—of quick understanding,—of all that, in deep insistence on the common, but most accurate term, may be called the 'tact' or touch-faculty of body and soul; that tact which the Mimosa has in trees, which the pure woman has above all creatures,—fineness and fulness of sensation, beyond reason,—the guide and sanctifier of reason itself. Reason can but determine what is true: it is the God-given passion of humanity which alone can recognize what God has made good.

"We come then to the great concourse of the Dead, not merely to know from them what is True, but chiefly to feel with them, what is Righteous. Now to feel with them we must be like them; and none of us can become that without pains. As the true knowledge is disciplined and tested knowledge,—not the first thought that comes,—so the true passion is disciplined and tested passion,—not the first passion that comes."

When we add to this deep feeling and sympathy the versatile poetic imagination which freely constructs all phases of social life and conduct, we have that union of the great powers of the mind and heart which give such concentrated ethical energy to the best literature.

Shelley, in his "Defence of Poetry" (pp. 13-14, 20), says:—

"The whole objection, however, of the immorality of poetry rests upon a misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral improvement of man. Ethical science arranges the elements which poetry has created, and propounds schemes and proposes examples of civil and domestic life; nor is it for want of admirable doctrines that men hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive, and subjugate one another. But poetry acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it reproduces all that it represents, and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it coexists. The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause."

"The drama being that form under which a greater number of modes of expression of poetry are susceptible of being combined than any other, the connection of poetry and social good is more observable in the drama than in whatever other form. And it is indisputable that the highest perfection of human society has ever corresponded with the highest dramatic excellence; and that the corruption or the extinction of the drama in a nation where it has once flourished, is a mark of corruption of manners, and an extinction of the energies which sustain the soul of social life."

The inseparable union of the intellectual, moral, and imaginative elements is well expressed by Shairp in his "On Poetic Interpretation of Nature" (pp. 23-24):—

"Imagination in its essence seems to be, from the first, intellect and feeling blended and interpenetrating each other. Thus it would seem that purely intellectual acts belong to the surface and outside of our nature,—as you pass onward to the depths, the more vital places of the soul, the intellectual, the emotional, and the moral elements are all equally at work,—and this in virtue of their greater reality, their more essential truth, their nearer contact with the centre of