es that his senses must be
developed, that the spirit must be waked in them, or not at all, the
study of Walter Pater will be in vain.

The physical organisation, the mere bodily state of the pupil, necessary
to appreciate either the form or the substance of a bit of writing like
_The Child in the House_, is the first thing a true teacher is concerned
with. A college graduate whose nostrils have not been trained for
years,--steeped in the great, still delights of the ground,--who has not
learned the spirit and fragrance of the soil beneath his feet, is not a
sufficiently cultivated person to pronounce judgment either upon Walter
Pater's style or upon his definition of style.

To be educated in the great literatures of the world is to be trained in
the drawing out in one's own body and mind of the physical and mental
powers of those who write great literatures. Culture is the feeling of
the induced current--the thrill of the lives of the dead--the charging
the nerves of the body and powers of the spirit with the genius that has
walked the earth before us. In the borrowed glories of the great for one
swift and passing page we walk before heaven with them, breathe the long
breath of the centuries with them, know the joy of the gods and live.
The man of genius is the man who literally gives himself. He makes every
man a man of genius for the time being. He exchanges souls with us and
for one brief moment we are great, we are beautiful, we are immortal. We
are visited with our possible selves. Literature is the transfiguring of
the senses in which men are dwelling every day and of the thoughts of
the mind in which they are living every day. It is the commingling of
one's life in one vast network of sensibility, communion, and eternal
comradeship with all the joy and sorrow, taste, odor, and sound, passion
of men and love of women and worship of God, that ever has been on the
earth, since the watching of the first night above the earth, or since
the look of the first morning on it, when it was loved for the first
time by a human life.

The artist is recognised as an artist in proportion as the senses of his
body drift their glow and splendour over into the creations of his mind.
He is an artist because his flesh is informed with the spirit, because
in whatever he does he incarnates the spirit in the flesh.

The gentle, stroking delight in this universe that Dr. Holmes took all
his days, his contagious gladness in it and ap