you, as one who has had large
experience in conducting other pilgrims over the same track, never lose
heart. Difficulties which now seem insurmountable, will gradually
disappear; subjects which now seem impenetrable, will soon lighten up.
Did you never enter a room in the dark? At first the apartment is a
universal blank. After a while, as your eyes become adjusted to the
place, one article after another of the furniture becomes outlined to
the vision, until at length, especially if approaching day lends some
additional rays of light, the whole scene stands out perfectly defined.
So it is in entering upon a new study. Many a passage in it will seem to
you at first a worse than Serbonian bog--a cave of impenetrable and
undistinguishable darkness. But draw not back. Look steadily on. Light
will come in time. Your power of seeing will, with every new trial,
receive adjustment and growth, and you will in the end see with full
and open vision where now you have only dim glimpses and guesses. Do not
be discouraged, therefore, if at first you fail, or seem to yourself to
fail, in almost every recitation you undertake. What seems impossible
to-day, will be only next to impossible to-morrow, and only very
difficult the day after. Your failures are often only the proofs that
you have a glimpse at least of something below the surface of things. A
discouraged pupil is never a source of anxiety to me. It is only the
self-confident and over-wearing that are hopeless.

3. I have spoken of recitations. Let me urge you to form some definite
idea of what a recitation is, and what kind of a recitation you, as a
pupil of a Normal School, should aim to make. And first of all, on this
point, let me say, the mere answering of questions, and especially, the
mere response of yes and no to questions, is not reciting,--assuredly
not such reciting as is to fit you for the office of a teacher. And, in
the next place, let me say, that repeating verbatim the words of the
book, is not the method of recitation at which you should aim. I do not
agree with those who would dissuade you entirely from cultivating the
faculty and enriching the stores of memory. Not only memory, in its
general exercise, but a purely verbal memory, is important. In your
lessons, are many things, rules, definitions, and so forth, that should
be learned with the most literal exactness, and should be so fixed in
the memory that they will come at your bidding, in any place, at any