I beg your attention for the exact words: 'to rise to the height of its great argument and _incorporate all its beauties in themselves._' There you have it--'to incorporate.' Do you remember that saying of Wordsworth's, casually dropped in conversation, but preserved for us by Hazlitt?--'It is in the highest degree unphilosophic to call language or diction the dress of our thoughts.... It is the _incarnation_ of our thoughts.' Even so, I maintain to you, the first business of a learner in literature is to get complete hold of some undeniable masterpiece and incorporate it, incarnate it. And, I repeat, there are a few great works for you to choose from: works approved for you by ancient and catholic judgment. IV But let us take something far simpler than the Ninth Book of "Paradise Lost" and more direct than any translated masterpiece can be in its appeal; something of high genius, written in our mother tongue. Let us take "The Tempest." Of "The Tempest" we may say confidently: (1) that it is a literary masterpiece: the last most perfect 'fruit of the noblest tree in our English Forest'; (2) that its story is quite simple; intelligible to a child: (its basis in fact is fairy-tale, pure and simple--as I tried to show in a previous lecture); (3) that in reading it--or in reading "Hamlet," for that matter-- the child has no sense at all of being patronised, of being 'written down to.' And this has the strongest bearing on my argument. The great authors, as Emerson says, never condescend. Shakespeare himself speaks to a slip of a boy, and that boy feels that he _is_ Ferdinand; (4) that, though Shakespeare uses his loftiest, most accomplished and, in a sense, his most difficult language: a way of talking it has cost him a life-time to acquire, in line upon line inviting the scholar's, prosodist's, poet's most careful study; that language is no bar to the child's enjoyment: but rather casts about the whole play an aura of magnificence which, with the assistant harmonies, doubles and redoubles the spell. A child no more resents this because it is strange than he objects to read in a fairytale of robbers concealed in oil-jars or of diamonds big as a roc's egg. When will our educators see that what a child depends on is imagination, that what he demands of life is the wonderful, the glittering, possibility? Now if, putting all this together and taking confidence from it, we boldly launch a child upon "The Tempest" we shall come sooner or later upon passages that _we_ have arrived at finding difficult. We shall come, for example, to the Masque of Iris, which Iris, invoking Ceres, thus opens: