Poetry is the finest flower of the human mind; and therefore the most difficult of all things to appreciate. In writing poetry the whole of a man's being is in a state of intense activity. His intellect, his emotion, his imagination, are all roused to the highest pitch. He is lifted for the time being to a plane of experience much higher than the normal; he is giving out the very best that is in him. Wordsworth has described for us how the poetic mood drove him distracted with intensity of thought over hill and dale, and how when the mood had passed he would return to his friends pale and utterly exhausted both in mind and body. His own mind did like a tempest strong Come to him thus and drove the weary wight along. All poetry worth reading is the result of some such exalted mood as that, and poetry so written cannot be read in cold blood. Poetry which leaves you cold, with your emotions untouched, which does not in some measure lift you out of yourself, is either not poetry at all, or else poetry which you have not the capacity to appreciate. One appreciates a poem only in so far as one reproduces it sympathetically in oneself; that is, only so far as one feels over again the emotions which the writer who produced it felt as he gave them expression. In other words, by the appreciation of literature one gains at second-hand the highest spiritual experience. It follows that one can appreciate poetry only to the extent to which one is capable of such experience. No one can appreciate fully all kinds of poetry; if any one could do so, it would mean that he was a universal genius, since the whole range of emotional experience would have to be within his control. The extent of the average man's powers of appreciation is distinctly limited; some can sympathize only with the more obvious and elemental emotions, while some are capable of appreciating more subtle and refined shades of feeling. That is why nearly every one can appreciate to some extent a poet like Shakespeare, who always deals with big, elemental emotions, although, since Shakespeare is at the same time able to express the most subtle feelings, there are few who can appreciate him in full. This is why it is more difficult to appreciate Wordsworth than Shakespeare--Wordsworth's emotions are more out of the range of ordinary experience--and still more difficult to appreciate Shelley, whose range of emotion is often entirely alien from experience. The point I wish to make is that a teacher can teach properly only poetry which he himself is capable of appreciating, and therefore literature is the most difficult of all subjects to teach, since it requires in the individual certain qualifications beyond the merely intellectual. For the lack of these qualifications, no brilliancy of intellect can compensate.