Suppose a teacher were to examine a student on such a poem as Coleridge's Christabel by questioning him about it, and the student were to show that he was thoroughly acquainted with all the facts and details of the poem; there would still be no evidence of that student's susceptibility to what in the poem constitutes its mysterious charm,--none whatever. The student might be utterly destitute of such susceptibility, and yet he could just as well prepare himself to answer all the teacher's questions. A very small boy might do so, whose appreciation of poetry had not gone beyond 'How doth the little busy bee.' There might be a most susceptible literary genius in the class, who might fall below the other student in such an examination! It is quite likely that he would, for he would be chiefly occupied with the poem as a poem, and would assimilate its life without retaining a recollection of all the details, to which the other had given exclusive attention. Or suppose the poem were Gray's Elegy written in a Country Churchyard, and the student were to pass a perfectly satisfactory examination thereupon, on the basis, say, of the valuable notes in Professor Hales's Longer English Poems; what would that signify, in comparison with the reading of the poem, which would unmistakably show whether he had responded, to any extent, or not, to its sweet evening pensiveness, to the general tenor of the theme, to the moulding spirit of the whole? That he should understand the articulating thought, all the grammatical constructions (and there are several which need to be particularly looked into), and all points to which attention is called in Professor Hales's notes, is, to be sure, important; but an examination confined to these would not be any test of his literary capacity, of his susceptibility to the poem as a poem. In these remarks, I assume, of course, that the prime object of a literary examination should be to test not so much a student's knowingness, as his literary capacity, which means a capacity to respond to the spiritual life of a poem, or any other form of literature, in the true sense of the word 'literature.' It is its spiritual life which makes a poem a poem, whatever the thought articulation may be. The student who is capable of such response should rank higher (nobody but a Dr. Dryasdust could deny this) than the student who could answer all questions which the most prolific questioner could ask him, but who could afford no evidence, through his reading of it, that the poem was anything more to him than was a primrose to Wordsworth's 'Peter Bell.'