This brings us at once to the vision of another service rendered the child by literature. Here he is as if he looked upon life. He sees events worked out to the issue; he sees people expressing themselves in deeds and words, transforming themselves and others for good or bad, calling upon him for approval or condemnation, or for sympathy. He finds here his heroes, his ideals, his models. He learns manners without tears and morals without a sermon. In some sense he sees life steadily, and sees it whole, so that he widens his social horizon to take in these many groups of all sorts of men; mentally and morally he must enlarge to contain the persons and events he learns to know. It is impossible to overestimate the importance in a child's moral life, whether we interpret this as a social or an individual matter, of the contribution made by literature to his vision, his pattern, of society and of character. This ability of literature to influence the child's inner life and his conduct is so real that it has as many dangers as advantages. There must be no mistakes in selecting for him, if he is to ascend in dignity of being by the steps of literature. It must contain those pictures of life and conduct that are fit and suitable for the child to witness, and possible for him to comprehend. They must be sound to the core, arousing and permanently engaging his genuine interest and his best feelings. And after all, the best thing we can do for a child in teaching him literature is to give him a permanent and innocent joy. We all have our moods in which we are ready to say that the first unconscious, unpremeditated pleasure that comes of a bit of literature is the only result worth having. And we who are professing teachers of literature have times of abnormal sensitiveness to the scorn of the dilettante critics who call us academical and pedagogical. And though we know that pleasure in literature has its elements and its causes, both easily observable, and that taste may be fostered and grown by well-known processes, it is always a wholesome hour for us when we are thrust back upon the fact that, though we may have disciplined his imagination, and may have quickened his fancy; we may have awakened and strengthened his sense of beauty; we may have exercised and cultivated his emotions; we may have enlarged his outlook upon life, and have provided him with social and personal ideals; it is nevertheless, better than all these because it includes most of them, if we have opened up for our scholar this permanent avenue of noble enjoyment.