tion, to all of these. The foremost practical statesman in England to-day is the man of letters, William E. Gladstone; the foremost statesman in Europe to-day is a graduate of two universities, Prince Bismarck; the foremost lawyer in America to-day bore off the highest honors for literary excellence at Yale just fifty years ago, and is said to have continued his classical studies ever since, William M. Evarts; one of the ablest of the many able ministers. who have represented America at the Court of St. James is our foremost man of letters to-day, James Russell Lowell; our smartest -I use the term designedly-living statesman possesses rare literary skill, James G. Blaine. These examples show that the practical cutting edge of tact is not less keen when it has a heavy backing of solid learning. Did not the pen of Moses largely shape Hebrew civilization? In Greek life, and even in Roman, did not the Iliad and the Odyssey exert enormous power? Is not our highest modern civilization the outgrowth of the Bible? Wordsworth never uttered profounder truth than when he wrote,

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spoke, the faith and morals hold
That Milton held.

The Bible, Shakespeare, Milton-whoever will thoroughly master these three will have a better business education than nine tenths of our college graduates: for he will have a knowledge of human nature, a knowledge that is better preparation for success than a knowledge of all the laws of matter and all the processes of machinery and all the tricks of trade.

But business success is not the principal thing. Nor is the chief object in the study of literature to gain just canons of criticism, important as these are; nor to memorize precious passages that will fulfill the triple function of a touchstone, a keynote, and "a joy forever." Nor is the chief object to learn the history of literature, nor the opinions of any man or set of men about literature or about any portion thereof or about the man who produced it. A little of the flavor of the historic sea in which the shell-fish grew; a little of the pepper and salt of wise criticism; a little of the personal history of the bivalve, if we can get it; may not be amiss: these may whet the appetite or enhance the relish; but they are no substitute for the oyster itself.

Neither is the chief object to learn etymology, or syntax,

are

or prosody, or rhetoric, or philology, or logic. These indeed very valuable, and may perhaps be studied best by making a great author's text the basis of investigation. Our schoolmasters often builded vastly better than they knew, when they made us painfully parse Milton's Lycidas, Pope's Messiah, or Coleridge's Hymn to Mont Blanc. While we were intently listening to find grammatical concords, as if that were the chief business of life and our teacher seemed to think so, we heard faintly at first but by-and-by more clearly the divine harmony that breathes through those immortal lines, and that could never be rendered entirely inaudible by the noisy machinery of gerund-grinding. While we hacked and hewed and bunglingly dissected the apparently lifeless form, to discover and label etymological tissue, syntactical sinews, logical boneframe, the caput mortuum gradually became a thing of life and beauty, as the cold marble under Pygmalion's chisel grew warm with immortal loveliness.

Neither is that graceful utility which Cicero points out in his oration for Archias, the main thing; the solace, the ornament, the light, the companionship, the serenity of soul which these studies bring. Lowell somewhere prettily says, and the value of the remark can hardly be overestimated: "If they do not help us get bread, they sweeten all the bread we ever do get." This result is very precious, but still secondary: we are here to diffuse, not to monopolize, sweetness and light.

To create and maintain in every student the highest ideal of human life is, or ought to be, the chief work of any college. There is no study like that of the best literature to form and glorify such an ideal. It reveals possibilities, touches to finer issues, broadens thought, kindles faith, sets the soul free, quickens and greatens, as nothing else can. Get near Homer and Demosthenes and Thucydides and Plato and the Greek tragedians; get near Virgil and Lucretius and Cicero and Tacitus; if you would know

"The glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome."

Arm in arm with a universal author, you are in living contact with the great facts and laws of nature and of human existence; you see them from the master's lofty standpoint and your life is larger than before. A single paragraph of Burke, if chewed

and digested and assimilated, much more a great oration like his speech on Conciliation with America, can hardly fail to broaden the horizon and liberalize the soul. Even the daily speech of our fathers, unlike the flippant nothings that fill our mouths, was tinctured with dignity and grace, caught from the fewer but better books with which their minds were saturated, and from companionship with the Chrysostoms and Burkes and Websters, the Shakespeares and Miltons and Johnsons, and the heroic beings that were the children of their brain. He that walketh with wise men shall be wise. The great authors give us their children and give us themselves.

"Ever their phantoms arise before us,

Our loftier brothers, but one in blood;
At bed and board they lord it o'er us

With looks of beauty and words of good!"

My time has expired, and I must not now discuss at length the question, How ought the great masterpieces to be studied? It is easier to tell how not to do it. In one of our foremost universities two or three years ago, I was present at a class exercise. They were reading a great writer's works. One member, evidently among those most interested, for he occasionally glanced at his book,—lay flat on his back at full length directly in front of the distinguished professor and within fifteen or twenty feet of him. The attitude was symbolic; the example was contagious. Was I dreaming? I have been present at many "performances" in English literature in school and college during the last twenty or thirty years, but never at another so dull and dead, nor have I ever breathed an atmosphere more somniferous out of a Chinese "opium joint."

Above all other men the teacher of literature should be intensely alive, not a cistern of stagnant knowledge, but a battery of communicative lightning; the incarnation of tact and vigilance and energy; making every class-exercise a work of high art; seizing instantly the heart of every passage, placing it in vital relation and proper perspective to the writer and the whole composition, focusing all eyes of students upon it, irradiating the subject with flashes of wit, wisdom, poetry, eloquence, parallels drawn from far and near, till the whole masterpiece blazes with all the fire and force and beauty that filled the soul of the author himself.

One word more. The course in literature should begin in the primary school, or even in the kindergarten, with memorizing of the choicest simple pieces. Always the greatest pains should be taken in the selection of passages. This exercise in memory should be carried on continuously and progressively through the grammar schools, with some attempt at logical method — analysis of beauty in the higher grades. In the high school, it should take the form of thorough study of some of the simpler masterpieces, like Gray's Elegy and Scott's Talisman, Milton's Comus, Wordsworth's Ode on Intimations of Immortality, Shakespeare's Merchant. By thorough study is not meant counting syllables nor scrutinizing orthography, nor affixing a grammatical label to every word, nor distinguishing colons from semicolons, nor tabulating lines spoken by different characters, nor deciding whether the author uses "his" for "its" a hundred times or only ninetynine or has seventy-five Anglo-Saxon roots to every twenty-five Latin; nor whether he planted a mulberry tree, or paid taxes with the right hand or the left, or had a short nose and a long upper lip, or spoke with mysterious meaning when he said, "It is a wise father that knows his own child;" but to seize, ponder, understand, enjoy, and hold fast, as an inspiration forever, all that is beautiful or noble or precious in the work under consideration. In college, some great work of one of the world-authors Greek, Latin, Italian, French, German, or English-should be constantly under investigation in a weekly, semi-weekly, or, better still, a daily, exercise through the four years, skill being exercised in so marking out the succession that the study may not only progress from the less to the more difficult, but that a tendency towards goodness and greatness may be ever more and more confirmed; the teacher, to use the language of Milton, "tempering them such lectures and explanations, upon every opportu nity, as should lead and draw them in willing obedience, inflamed with the study of learning, and the admiration of virtue, stirred up with high hopes of living to be brave men and worthy patriots, dear to God and famous to all ages.'

Well did the ancients call this and kindred studies the Humanities. For, as we have seen, the prime quality of all literature worthy of the name is its deep hold of man as man; and the best is that which appeals most strongly to the highest human qualities; and the special object in view in the study should ever be

perfect manliness and womanliness; and the chief joy that accompanies is in the association with heroic manhood and angelic womanhood; and the best result is unselfish service enriching mankind; and the one thing indispensable in him who would teach it is that he be sympathetic, large, sweet souled, thoroughly equipped, intensely alive and true. Manliness, in the best sense, is godliness. With the conception of the possible union of the human and the divine, poetry passes into religion; for in that vision which Lowell declares to be the sublimest reach to which poetry has risen, the last lines of Dante's Paradiso, beginning,

Within the deep and luminous subsistence

Of the High Light appeared to me three circles
Of threefold color and of one dimension,
And by the second seemed the first reflected
As rainbow is by rainbow, and the third

Seemed fire that equally from both is breathed,

in this wondrous vision, where the High Light is the very substance of God, and the three luminous revolving circles symbolize the Trinity of the Eternal Power, the Eternal Love, and the Eternal Wisdom, Dante tells us that, after gazing for a time on the three, all his sight was gradually absorbed in the second; for there he saw painted our image, the image of Man!

He who must needs have company must needs have sometimes bad company. Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude and the society of thyself; nor be only content but delight to be alone and single with Omnipresency. He who is thus prepared, the day is not uneasy nor the night black unto him. Darkness may bound his eyes, not his imagination. SIR THOMAS BROWNE.