Children are likely to be susceptible to marked metrical effects, as witness their love of "Mother Goose;" but to the more delicate music of verse they are often largely or completely insensitive. A musical ear is not, it is probable, to be created, but it is certainly possible to develop the metrical sense. Children who are born with good native responsiveness to rhythm often are so badly trained or so neglected as to seem to have none, and it is part of the office of instruction to call out whatever powers lie in them latent. This is largely accomplished by the sort of use of literature which I have called "inspirational." In the ideal home-training children are so taken on from the rhymes of the nursery to more advanced literature that development of the rhythmical sense is continuous and inevitable; but one of the things which every school-teacher knows best is that this sort of home-training is rare and the work must be done in the class. The substitute is a poor one, but it has at least some degree of the universal human responsiveness to rhythm to appeal to. Another difficulty is that children have to learn the verbal language of literature. Much of the atmosphere of a poem, for instance, is likely to be produced by suggestion, by the mention of legend or tale or hero, when the reader must find in previous knowledge and association a key to what is intended. All this is likely to be largely or entirely lost on children; and yet this is often the very quintessence of what the author tries to convey. Children are constantly at the same disadvantage in understanding literature that they are in comprehending life. They have not gathered the associations or experienced the emotions which make so large a part of the language of great writers. All this renders it difficult for the instructor to be sure that his class has any inkling even of the mood in which a piece is intended; yet he must first of all be sure that as far as is possible he has put them, each pupil according to his character and acquirements, in touch with the spirit of the work to be studied. This cannot be done entirely. We cannot hope that a lad of a dozen years will enter into all the emotions, all the passions of the great poets. He may, however, be absorbingly interested and thrilled by "Macbeth," or the "Tempest," or the "Merchant of Venice." He does not get from these plays all that his elders might get, any more than he would perceive the full meaning and passion of a tremendous situation in real life; but he does get some portion of the message, some perception of the deeps and heights of human nature. Even if he find no more than simple, unreasoning enjoyment, he is gaining unconsciously, and he is obviously nourishing a love for good literature.