J. C. Shairp, in his "On Poetic Interpretation of Nature" (p. 19), says:-- "The real nature and intrinsic truth of Poetry will be made more apparent, if we may turn aside for a moment to reflect on the essence of that state of mind which we call poetic, the genesis of that creation which we call Poetry. Whenever any object of sense, or spectacle of the outer world, any truth of reason, or event of past history, any fact of human experience, any moral or spiritual reality; whenever, in short, any fact or object which the sense, or the intellect, or the soul, or the spirit of man can apprehend, comes home to one so as to touch him to the quick, to pierce him with a more than usual vividness and sense of reality, then is awakened that stirring of the imagination, that glow of emotion, in which Poetry is born. There is no truth cognizable by man which may not shape itself into Poetry." The passages just quoted are but examples of many that might be cited expressing the strength and scope of the poetic spirit, its truth-revealing quality, its penetrating yet comprehensive grasp of the realities. Shelley says, "A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth"; and Wordsworth that poetry is "the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge." These utterances will hardly be deemed poetical extravagancies to one who has read such things as the Ninetieth Psalm, "King Lear," or "The Deserted Village," or "Elaine." There is no form of inspiring truth which does not find expression in literature, but it is preëminently a revelation of human life and experience, a proclamation from the housetops of the supreme beauty and excellence of truth and virtue. This brings us close to the question of moral education, and the elements in literature that contribute to this end. Literary critics are quick to take alarm at the propensity of the schoolmaster and the moralist to make literature the vehicle of moral training. To saddle the poets with a moral purpose would be like changing Pegasus into a plough-horse. But the moral quality in the best literature is not something saddled on, it is rather like the frame and muscle which give strength to the body, or, to use a more fitting figure, it is the very pulse and heart-beat of the highest idealism. The proneness toward moralizing, toward formal didacticism, can be best of all corrected by the use of choice literature. The best literature is free from moral pedantry, but full of moral suggestion and stimulus. Edmund Clarence Stedman says, in his "Nature and Elements of Poetry" (p. 216):--