g what it is to be sensitive to a book,
does not produce a very literary-looking result, of course, and it is
hard to give the result an impressive or learned look in a catalogue,
and it is a difficult thing to do without considering each pupil as a
special human being by himself,--worthy of some attention on that
account,--but it is the one upright, worthy, and beautiful thing a
teacher can do. Any easier course he may choose to adopt in an
institution of learning (even when it is taken helplessly or
thoughtlessly as it generally is) is insincere and spectacular, a
despising not only of the pupil but of the college public and of one's
self.

If it is true that the right study of literature consists in exercising
and opening out the human mind instead of making it a place for cold
storage, it is not necessary to call attention to the essential
pretentiousness and shoddiness of the average college course in
literature. At its best--that is, if the pupils do not do the work, the
study of literature in college is a sorry spectacle enough--a kind of
huge girls' school with a chaperone taking its park walk. At its
worst--that is, when the pupils do do the work, it is a sight that would
break a Homer's heart. If it were not for a few inspired and
inconsistent teachers blessing particular schools and scholars here and
there, doing a little guilty, furtive teaching, whether or no,
discovering short-cuts, climbing fences, breaking through the fields,
and walking on the grass, the whole modern scheme of elaborate,
tireless, endless laboriousness would come to nothing, except the sight
of larger piles of paper in the world, perhaps, and rows of dreary,
dogged people with degrees lugging them back and forth in it,--one pile
of paper to another pile of paper, and a general sense that something is
being done.

In the meantime, human life around us, trudging along in its anger,
sorrow, or bliss, wonders what this thing is that is being done, and has
a vague and troubled respect for it; but it is to be noted that it buys
and reads the books (and that it has always bought and read the books)
of those who have not done it, and who are not doing it,--those who,
standing in the spectacle of the universe, have been sensitive to it,
have had a mighty love in it, or a mighty hate, or a true experience,
and who have laughed and cried with it through the hearts of their
brothers to the ends of the earth.

III

The Organs of Literature