ideals, and, best of all, it portrays human life in all its thought, feeling, and passion with such intensity and realistic fidelity that its teaching power is unparalleled. This potentiality of the better literature to produce such noble results in the higher range of culture is dependent upon conditions. No one will understand literature who does not study and understand ordinary life as it surrounds him; who does not constantly draw upon his own experience in interpreting the characters portrayed in books. No stupid or unobservant person will be made wise through books, be they never so choice. Even the student who works laboriously at his text-books, but has no eye nor care for the people or doings about him, is getting only the mechanical side of education, and is losing the better part. He who will draw riches out of books must put his intellect and sympathy, his whole enthusiastic better self, into them. The indwelling virtue of great books is that they demand this intense awakening, this complete absorption of the whole self. The mind of a child and of a man or woman has to stretch itself to the utmost limit to take in the message of a great writer. One feels the old barriers giving way and the mind expanding to the conception of larger things. Speaking of the ancient drama at Athens, Shelley says, "The imagination is enlarged by a sympathy with pains and passions so mighty that they distend in their conception the capacity of that by which they are conceived." Those who have received into the inner self the expansive energy of noble thought and social culture, are the better qualified, from the rich variety of the inner life, to act effectively upon the complex conditions and forces of the outer world. The teacher whose inner life is teeming with these rich sympathies and potent ideals will react with greater prudence and tact upon the kaleidoscopic conditions of a school. Practical social life and literature are not distinct modes of culture. They are one, they interact upon each other in scores of ways. Give a teacher social opportunities, give him the best of our literature, let these two work their full influence upon him,--then, if he cannot become a teacher, it is a hopeless case. Let him go to the shop, to the farm, to the legislature; there is no place for him in the schoolroom. Literature is also a sharp and caustic critic of his own follies or foibles, to one who can reflect. It has a multitude of surprises by which we are able, as Burns wished,-- "To see oursels as ithers see us." Even the schoolmaster finds an occasional apt description of himself in literature which it is often interesting and entertaining for him to ponder. One of the most familiar is that of Goldsmith in "The Deserted Village":--