“Very well, father. I should like to go with you.” My father talked about various things on the way. I remember in particular some remarks he made about reading Virgil, for I had just begun the Æneid. For one thing, he told me I must scan every line until I could make it sound like poetry, else I should neither enjoy it properly, nor be fair to the author. Then he repeated some lines from Milton, saying them first just as if they were prose, and after that the same lines as they ought to be sounded, making me mark the difference. Next he did the same with a few of the opening lines of Virgil’s great poem, and made me feel the difference there. “The sound is the shape of it, you know, Ranald,” he said, “for a poem is all for the ear and not for the eye. The eye sees only the sense of it; the ear sees the shape of it. To judge poetry without heeding the sound of it, is nearly as bad as to judge a rose by smelling it with your eyes shut. The sound, besides being a beautiful thing in itself, has a sense in it which helps the other out. A psalm tune, if it’s the right one, helps you to see how beautiful the psalm is. Every poem carries its own tune in its own heart, and to read it aloud is the only way to bring out its tune.” I liked Virgil ever so much better after this, and always tried to get at the tune of it, and of every other poem I read. “The right way of anything,” said my father, “may be called the tune of it. We have to find out the tune of our own lives. Some people don’t seem ever to find it out, and so their lives are a broken and uncomfortable thing to them--full of ups and downs and disappointments, and never going as it was meant to go.” “But what is the right tune of a body’s life, father?” “The will of God, my boy.” “But how is a person to know that, father?” “By trying to do what he knows of it already. Everybody has a different kind of tune in his life, and no one can find out another’s tune for him, though he _may_ help him to find it for himself.” “But aren’t we to read the Bible, father?” “Yes, if it’s in order to obey it. To read the Bible thinking to please God by the mere reading of it, is to think like a heathen.” “And aren’t we to say our prayers, father?” “We are to ask God for what we want. If we don’t want a thing, we are only acting like pagans to speak as if we did, and call it prayer, and think we are pleasing him.” I was silent. My father resumed. “I fancy the old man we are going to see found out the tune of _his_ life long ago.” “Is he a very wise man then, father?” “That depends on what you mean by _wise_. _I_ should call him a wise man, for to find out that tune is the truest wisdom. But he’s not a learned man at all. I doubt if he ever read a book but the Bible, except perhaps the Pilgrim’s Progress. I believe he has always been very fond of that. _You_ like that--don’t you, Ranald?” “I’ve read it a good many times, father. But I was a little tired of it before I got through it last time.”