beautiful sights and sounds of the physical world, so we earnestly desire for him contact with the noble and beautiful objects and persons of the other-world of literature. In the second place, literature, whether it be handling beautiful material or for any reason dealing with ugly material, is always seeking beauty of form. There are the larger matters of art-form, such as unity, harmony, completeness, balance--those large beneficent elements of beauty which should be in the child's literature as in all his other art, constituting the genial atmosphere which he breathes in without knowing it. Of course, one does not talk to him about them, but there they are in his story, his picture, his song, bringing their gift of certainty and repose. Then there are the more concrete and obvious details of formal beauty that belong distinctively to the literary art, and are partly matters of craftsmanship--the musical effect of the spoken word, prose or verse, the choice word or phase, the beautiful arrangement of clause or sentence. Certain of these elements may be deliberately brought to the child's attention, others may not. But in either case they help to form the whole atmosphere of beauty and distinction that surrounds a bit of good literature. And we cannot fail to believe in the refining and stimulating influence upon the child's taste of his contact with formal beauty in this as in the other arts. As distinctive of literature, setting it apart from other kinds of writing, one must note that it always has in it the warmth, the fervor, of emotion, "Dowered with the scorn of scorn, the love of love, the hate of hate," is the poet, and always the glow of feeling lights up his line. "The foxglove blooms centripetally," is cold and colorless, however interesting it may be as technical fact, The fox-gloves drop from throat to top, A daily lesser bell quivers with emotional associations. "I come to bury Caesar not to praise him"--the caesura of that line is Mark Antony's sob, and the sympathetic throb of the elementary class. The king sits in Dumfermline toun Drinking the blude-red wine. What strange thrill is this that goes down the eight-year-old's spine at the sound of these words? It was an ancient mariner And he stoppeth one of three. The mere lines submerge us at once in a new atmosphere tingling with charmed excitement. One would like to say with some new meaning and emphasis that it is precisely this emotion, permeating, warming, and coloring literature, that gives it its reality, that establishes its hold, that gives it its relation to the world--on the one side reflecting life on the other producing life.