What a lesson for the teacher! What models upon which to develop his style of thinking! If the teaching profession and its work could be weighed in the balance, the scale would fall on the side of the abstract with a heavy thud. Not that object lessons will save us. They only parody the truth. For the object lesson as a separate thing we have no use at all. But to ground every idea and every study in realism, to pass up steadily through real objects and experience to a perception of truths which have wide application, to science--this is the true philosophy of teaching. The classic writers lead us even one grand step beyond realism. The fancy builds better than the cold reason. It adorns and ennobles thought till it becomes full-fledged for the flight toward the ideal. As the poet, standing by the sea-shore, ponders the life that has been in the now empty shell washed up from the deep, his fancy discovers in the shell a resemblance to human life and destiny, and he cries:-- "Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!" Is it possible that one could fall under the sway of the poets and artists, appropriate their images and fruitful style of thought, be wrought upon by their fancies, and still remain dull and lifeless and prosaic in the class-room? No wonder that true literature has been called the literature of power, as distinguished from the literature of knowledge (supplementary readers, pure science, information books, etc.). The lives and works of our best writers contain an expansive spiritual energy, which, working into the mind of a teacher, breaks the shell of mechanism and formality. The artist gives bright tints and colors to ideas which would otherwise be faded and bleached. The study of the best literature adapted to children in each age is a fruitful form of psychology and child study. The series of books selected for the different grades is supposed to be adapted to the children at each period. The books which suit the temper and taste of children in primary grades are peculiar in quality, and fit those pupils better than older ones. In intermediate classes the boyhood spirit, which delights in myth, physical deeds of prowess, etc., shows itself, and many of the stories, ballads, and longer poems breathe this spirit. In grammar grades the expanding, maturing minds of children leap forward to the appreciation of more complex and extended forms of literature which deal with some of the great problems of life more seriously, as "Snow-Bound," "Evangeline," "Roger de Coverley," "Merchant of Venice," etc.