in Emerson’s description of an Indian-summer day, “the day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm, wide fields”--in these and such as these we see the imaginative use of words. Most of the Dantean and Homeric and Shakespearean scholarship is the mere dust of time that has accumulated upon these names. In the course of years it will accumulate upon Tennyson, and then we shall have Tennysonian scholars and learned dissertations upon some insignificant detail of his work. Think of the Shakespeareana with which literature is burdened! It is mostly mere shop litter and dust. In certain moods I think one may be pardoned for feeling that Shakespeare is fast becoming a curse to the human race. Of mere talk about him, it seems, there is to be no end. He has been the host of more literary parasites probably than any other name in history. He is edited and re-edited as if a cubit could be added to his stature by marginal notes and comments. On the contrary, the result is, for the most part, like a mere growth of underbrush that obscures the forest trees. The reader’s attention is being constantly diverted from the main matter--he is being whipped in the face by insignificant twigs. Criticism may prune away what obscures a great author, but what shall we say when it obstructs the view of him by a multitude of unimportant questions? The main aim of the teacher of literature should be to train and quicken the student’s taste--his sense of the fitness and proportion of things--till he can detect the true from the false, or the excellent from the common. There is but one way to learn to detect the genuine from the counterfeit in any department of life, and that is by experience. Familiarize the student with the works of the real masters of literature and you have safeguarded him against the pretenders. After he has become acquainted with the look and the ring of the pure gold he is less likely to be imposed upon by the counterfeit. The end here indicated cannot be reached by analysis, or by a course in rhetoric and sentence structure, or by a microscopical examination of the writer’s vocabulary, but by direct sympathetic intercourse with the best literature, through the living voice, or through your own silent perusal of it. The great Dantean and Shakespearean scholar is usually the outcome of a mental habit that would make Dante and Shakespeare impossible.