The school to the realist presupposes the library. The teacher needs books, plenty of books in order to increase his knowledge and thus become better acquainted with that world through which he has to pilot his pupils. In the books, then, in the long shelves, culture lives: in the innumerable volumes that no one ever hopes to read; in the shelves which contain a world of beautiful things, and so valuable that man, as Horace says, should spend sleepless nights in order to acquire them, should endure cold and heat, fatigue and sacrifice. For humanity, we are told, lives in those volumes to which the teacher must somehow link himself if he intends to advance properly, to live the life which our forefathers have generously endowed for us, and to protect our spiritual inheritance from dispersion. In this atmosphere he must live; he must plunge in that spiritual sea which rolls limitless across the centuries. The pupil looks out upon this ocean which allures every man who is born to the life of culture. At first he clings to the shore, dreads the water, and asks to be helped until he has at least become familiar with the element. Who will encourage the beginner to leave the dry land and plunge into the deep where he would meet sure destruction? He must first be trained in some sheltered cove, where protected from the violence of the tumultuous surf, from the might of the indivisible mass of the ocean, he may gradually learn the ways of the deep. The student must accordingly begin with a definite book; he must be saved from the haunting power of the library, which draws the youthful mind towards every volume, towards every subject. In the multitude of books, not all of them read, not all of them readable, thought founders, sees nothing, thinks nothing, is unable to rest in any of the things which he imagines exist in the vast library shelves. He must choose. Let him select, say, Dante. He reads the _Divine Comedy_, the poem written by that great Italian who has been dead these six centuries and now rests at Ravenna, no longer mindful of his Francesca, of his magnanimous Farinata, of his kindly master Brunetto, or of Beatrice. Dante created his miraculous world, he breathed life into his characters, wrote the last line of his last canto, smiled in rapture at the divine beauty of his creation, now complete and perfect, and died. His manuscript was copied thousands of times; and after the discovery of printing, millions of copies were made. In one of these we now are able to find it, this divine poem, just as it was written,--for we want it exactly as it flowed from his pen without the change of a letter, without the omission of a comma. And this volume is an example of what exists in a library,--of the culture that teachers strive to find there, and thence communicate to their pupils!--something that belongs to the world, something which is a part of reality, which men therefore can grasp, if