The first feeling of the class on learning that such a ride was not taken is sure to be one of disappointment. It is better to meet this frankly, and to compensate for it by arousing interest in the embodiment of abstract feeling. One great source of the lack of interest in literature at the present time is that the material, practical character of the age makes it difficult for the general reader to respect anything but the concrete fact. Literature is apt to present itself to the hard-headed young fellow of the public school as a lot of make-believe stuff, and therefore at best a matter of rather frivolous amusement. The surest way of correcting this common attitude of mind is to nourish the appreciation of what fact in art really means; to cultivate a clear perception of how a poem or a tale may be the truest thing in the world, although dealing with imaginary personages and with incidents which never happened.[114:1] As an illustration of the sense in which literature is a sort of algebra of human feeling somewhat more remote from the ordinary life of a child may be taken another poem of Browning's, "The Lost Leader." My experience is that most youth of the school age start out by being able to make little or nothing of this. By a little talk, however, beginning perhaps as simply as with the way in which a lad feels when a school-fellow he had faith in has failed in a crisis, has for some personal advantage gone over to the other party in a school election, or of how the class would feel if some teacher who had been with the students in some effort to obtain an extension of privilege to which the scholars felt themselves to be honestly entitled had for his own purposes swung over to the opposite side, the whole thing may be brought home. The boys may be led on to imagine what are the feelings of a youth eager for the cause of freedom and the uplifting of man, when one whom he has looked to as a leader, one in whom he has had absolute faith, deserts the rank for honors or for money. Once the young minds are on the right track it is by no means impossible to bring them to see pretty clearly that in the poem is not the question of a particular man or a particular cause; but that Browning is dealing with a universal expression of the pain that would come to any man, to any one of them, in believing that the leader who had been most trusted and revered had in reality been unworthy, and had betrayed the cause his followers believed he would gladly die to defend.