All teaching is merely a way of acquainting the learner with the body of existing tradition. If the child is ever to have anything to say of his own, he has need of every bit of this expressive medium to help him do it. The reason is, that, so far as expressiveness goes, only one language exists. Every experiment and usage of the past is a part of this language. A phrase or an idea rises in the Hebrew, and filters through the Greek or Latin and French down to our own time. The practitioners who scribble and dream in words from their childhood up,--into whose habit of thought language is kneaded through a thousand reveries,--these are the men who receive, reshape, and transmit it. Language is their portion, they are the priests of language. The same thing holds true of the other vehicles of idea, of painting, architecture, religion, etc., but since we have been speaking of language, let us continue to speak of language. Expressiveness follows literacy. The poets have been tremendous readers always. Petrarch, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Byron, Keats--those of them who possessed not much of the foreign languages had a passion for translations. It is amazing how little of a foreign language you need if you have a passion for the thing written in it. We think of Shakespeare as of a lightly-lettered person; but he was ransacking books all day to find plots and language for his plays. He reeks with mythology, he swims in classical metaphor: and, if he knew the Latin poets only in translation, he knew them with that famished intensity of interest which can draw the meaning through the walls of a bad text. Deprive Shakespeare of his sources, and he could not have been Shakespeare. Good poetry is the echoing of shadowy tongues, the recovery of forgotten talent, the garment put up with perfumes. There is a passage in the Tempest which illustrates the freemasonry of artistic craft, and how the weak sometimes hand the torch to the mighty. Prospero’s apostrophe to the spirits is, surely, as Shakespearian as anything in Shakespeare and as beautiful as anything in imaginative poetry. “Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves; And ye, that in the sands with printless foot Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him, When he comes back; you demi-puppets, that By moonshine do the sour ringlets make, Whereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastime Is to make midnight mushrooms that rejoice To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid (Weak masters though ye be) I have bedimmed The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds, And ’twixt the green sea and the azur’d vault Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder Have I given fire, and rifted Jove’s stout oak With his own bolt: the strong-bas’d promontory Have I made shake; and by the spurs pluck’d up The pine and cedar: graves at my command Have waked their sleepers; oped and let them forth By my so potent art.”