is with a set of t� i which foundations of be seldom or never uses in common speech he must to appreciate fine distinctions in the use of e he must receive from words a precision and a force of meaning a richness of suggestion which is to be appreciated only by special and training it will be instructive for the teacher to take any ordinary high school class for instance and examine how far each member gets a complete and notion of what meant in the opening sentence of the speech on i hope sir that tha of the chair your good nature will incline you to some degree of indulgence toward an is apt to assume that the intent of a passage such as this is entirely clear yet i apprehend that not one high school pupil in twenty gets the real force of this if this example seems in its too remote from every day speech to be a fair example tha teacher may try the experiment with the sentence in books in which speaks of volumes that are so ho so bo every word is of common habitual use but most people would be well nigh helpless when confronted with them in this passage the use in literature of allusion of figures of j striking and unusual employment of words must be i come familiar to the student before he is in a con i to deal with literature easily and with full j talks on teaching literature i intelligence the process must be almost like that i of learning to read in a foreign tongue for a � teacher to this ia to the position of a professor in italian or spanish who begins the reading of his pupils not with words and simple sentences but with intricate prose and verse it must be remembered moreover that if the of literature ia removed from the daily experience of the pupil the ideas and the sentiments of literature are yet more widely apart from it literature must deal largely with abstract thoughts and ideas expressed or implied it is necessarily concerned with sentiments more elevated or more profound than those with which life makes the young familiar they must be educated to take the point of view of the author to rise to the mental plane of a great writer as far as they are capable of so doing until they can in some measure accomplish this they are not even capable of reading the literature they are supposed to study it is with reading literature aa it is with ling foreign tongues often the the general tone the spirit will carry us over passages in which there is much that is not clear to our exact knowledge children are constantly able to get from a story or a poem much more than would seem to their ignorance of the language of literature are helped by truth to life even when they are far from what they are receiving so that it would be unjust to assume that the measure of a child s profit of work in a given case is to be too nicely by acquaintance witb tbe words tbe the the in tbe conveyed it tbe fact remains tbat in attempting to do effective in the way of instruction tbe teacher first of all to train pupil in tbe language of literature the student having learned to read the work which is to be studied must approach it through some personal experience tbe teacher who ia to assist him must therefore discover what in tbe child s range of knowledge may best serve as a point of departure in all education no less than in formal argument a start can be made only from a point of agreement from something as evident to the student as it is to the con or unconsciously every teacher acts upon this principle from the early lessons in addition which begin witb the obvious agreement produced by the sight of tbe blocks or apples or beads which are before tbe child in literature too the fact is commonly acted upon if not so universally if young pupils are having the village blacksmith read to them the teacher instinctively starts witb the fact that they may have seen a blacksmith at work at hia the difficulty is that teachers who naturally do this in simple poems fail to see that the same principle holds good of literature of a higher order and that tbe more complex the problem the greater tlie need of being sure of this beginning with some actual experience talks on teaching literature with this finding some safe and substantial f in the pupil s own experience is con ti the necessity of speaking of literature as of anything else one tries to teach in the language of the class addressed all that we say to our pupils very little if any of all our careful wisdom really them or remains in their minds except that portion which we have managed to phrase in terms of their language and so to put that it appeals to emotions of their own young lives they can have no conception of the characters in fiction � or poetry except in so far as they are able to con r these shadows as moving in their own world they should be told to make up their minds about lady or robin hood or dr as if these were persons of their own community about whom they had learned the facts set forth in the books read they cannot completely realize this but they get hold of the character only so far as they are able to do it they will at least come to have a conception that people they see in the flesh and those they meet in literature are of the same stuff and should be judged by the same laws hey will receive the benefit moreover 