are too large. When one considers, however, the
average class in literature, as it actually is, and the things that are
being taught in it, it becomes obvious that the larger such a class can
be made, and the less the pupil can be made to get out of it, the
better.

The best test of a man's knowledge of the Spanish language would be to
put him in a balloon and set him down in dark night in the middle of
Spain and leave him there with his Spanish words. The best test of a
man's knowledge of books is to see what he can do without them on a
desert island in the sea. When the ship's library over the blue horizon
dwindles at last in its cloud of smoke and he is left without a shred of
printed paper by him, the supreme opportunity of education will come to
him. He will learn how vital and beautiful, or boastful and empty, his
education is. If it is true education, the first step he takes he will
find a use for it. The first bird that floats from its tree-top shall be
a message from London straight to his soul. If he has truly known them,
the spirits of all his books will flock to him. If he has known
Shakespeare, the ghost of the great master will rise from beneath its
Stratford stone, and walk oceans to be with him. If he knows Homer,
Homer is full of Odysseys trooping across the seas. Shall he sit him
down on the rocks, lift his voice like a mere librarian, and, like a
book-raised, paper-pampered, ink-hungry babe cry to the surf for a Greek
dictionary? The rhythm of the beach is Greece to him, and the singing of
the great Greek voice is on the tops of waves around the world.

A man's culture is his knowledge become himself. It is in the seeing of
his eyes and the hearing of his ears and the use of his hands. Is there
not always the altar of the heavens and the earth? Laying down days and
nights of joy before it and of beauty and wonder and peace, the scholar
is always a scholar, _i. e._, he is always at home. To be cultured is to
be so splendidly wrought of body and soul as to get the most joy out of
the least and the fewest things. Wherever he happens to be,--whatever he
happens to be without,--his culture is his being master. He may be naked
before the universe, and it may be a pitiless universe or a gracious
one, but he is always master, knowing how to live in it, knowing how to
hunger and die in it, or, like Stevenson, smiling out of his poor, worn
body to it. He is the unconquerable man. Wherever he is in the world, h