proval of it, his
impressionableness to its moods--its Oliver-Wendell ones,--who really
denies in his soul that this capacity of Dr. Holmes to enjoy, this
delicate, ceaseless tasting with sense and spirit of the essence of
life, was the very substance of his culture? The books that he wrote and
the things that he knew were merely the form of it. His power of
expression was the blending of sense and spirit in him, and because his
mind was trained into the texture of his body people delighted in his
words in form and spirit both.

There is no training in the art of expression or study of those who know
how to express, that shall not consist, not in a pupil's knowing wherein
the power of a book lies, but in his experiencing the power himself, in
his entering the life behind the book and the habit of life that made
writing such a book and reading it possible. This habit is the habit of
incarnation.

A true and classic book is always the history some human soul has had in
its tent of flesh, camped out beneath the stars, groping for the thing
they shine to us, trying to find a body for it. In the great wide plain
of wonder there they sing the wonder a little time to us, if we listen.
Then they pass on to it. Literature is but the faint echo tangled in
thousands of years, of this mighty, lonely singing of theirs, under the
Dome of Life, in the presence of the things that books are about. The
power to read a great book is the power to glory in these things, and to
use that glory every day to do one's living and reading with. Knowing
what is in the book may be called learning, but the test of culture
always is that it will not be content with knowledge unless it is inward
knowledge. Inward knowledge is the knowledge that comes to us from
behind the book, from living for weeks with the author until his habits
have become our habits, until God Himself, through days and nights and
deeds and dreams, has blended our souls together.

IV

Entrance Examinations in Joy

If entrance examinations in joy were required at our representative
colleges very few of the pupils who are prepared for college in the
ordinary way would be admitted. What is more serious than this, the
honour-pupils in the colleges themselves at commencement time--those who
have submitted most fully to the college requirements--would take a
lower stand in a final examination in joy, whether of sense or spirit,
than any others in the class. Their education has no