Literature, both in prose and verse, is what the teacher needs, because our best authors are our best teachers in their method of handling their subjects. They know how to find access to the reader's mind by making their ideas attractive, interesting, and beautiful. They seem to know how to sharpen the edge of truth to render it more keen and incisive. They drive truth deeper, so that it remains embedded in the life and thought. Let a poet clothe an idea with strength and wing it with fancy, and it will find its way straight to the heart. First of all, nearly all our classic writers, especially those we use in the grades, handle their subjects from the concrete, graphic, picturesque side. They not only illustrate abundantly from nature and real things in life; they nearly always individualize and personify their ideas. Virtue to a poet is nothing unless it is impersonated. A true poet is never abstract or dry or formal in his treatment of a subject. It is natural for a literary artist, whether in verse or prose, to create pictures, to put all his ideas into life forms and bring them close to the real ones in nature. Homer's idea of wisdom is Minerva, war is Mars, strength is Ajax, skill and prudence are Ulysses, faithfulness is Penelope. Dickens does not talk about schoolmasters in general, but of Squeers. Shakespeare's idea of jealousy is not a definition, not a formula, but Othello. Those books which have enthralled the world, like "Robinson Crusoe," "Pilgrim's Progress," "Gulliver's Travels," "Arabian Nights," "Evangeline," "Ivanhoe," "Merchant of Venice,"--they deal with no form of classified or generalized knowledge; they give us no definitions, they are scenes from real life. They stand among realities, and their roots are down in the soil of things. They are persons hemmed in by the close environment of facts. This realism, this objectifying of thought, this living form of knowledge, is characteristic of all great writers in prose or verse. The novelist, the romancer, the poet, the orator, and even the essayist, will always put the breath of reality into his work by an infusion of concreteness, of graphic personification. The poet's fancy, building out of the abundant materials of sense-experience, is what gives color and warmth to all his thoughts. Strong writers make incessant use of figures of speech. Their thought must clothe itself with the whole panoply of imagery and graphic representation in order to be efficient in the warfare for truth.