e
cannot be old in the presence of the pageant of Life. From behind the
fading of his face lie watches it, child after child, spring after
spring as it flies before him; he will not grow old while it still
passes by. It carries delight across to him to the end. He watches and
sings with it to the end, down to the edge of sleep.

A bird's shadow is enough to be happy with, if a man is educated, or the
flicker of light on a leaf, and when really a song is being lived in a
man, all nature plays its accompaniment. To possess one's own senses, to
know how to conduct one's self, is to be the conductor of orchestras in
the clouds and in the grass. The trained man is not dependent on having
the thing itself. He borrows the boom of the sea to live with, anywhere,
and the gladness of continents.

Literary training consists in the acquiring of a state of mind and body
to feel the universe with; in becoming an athlete toward beauty, a giver
of great lifts of joy to this poor, straining, stumbling world with its
immemorial burden on its back, which, going round and round, for the
most part with its eyes shut, between infinities, is the hope and sorrow
of all of us for the very reason that its eyes are shut.

IX

Summary

The proper conditions for literary drill in college would seem to sum
themselves up in the general idea that literature is the spirit of life.
It can therefore only be taught through the spirit.

_First._ It can only be taught through the spirit by being taught as an
art, through its own nature and activity, reproductively--giving the
spirit body. Both the subject-matter and the method in true literary
drill can only be based on the study of human experience. The intense
study of human experience in a college course may be fairly said to
involve three things that must be daily made possible to the pupil in
college life. Everything that is given him to do, and everything that
happens to him in college, should cultivate these three things in the
pupil: (1) Personality--an intense first person singular, as a centre
for having experience; (2) Imagination--the natural organ in the human
soul for realising what an experience is and for combining and
condensing it; (3) The habit of having time and room, for
re-experiencing an experience at will in the imagination, until the
experience becomes so powerful and vivid, so fully realises itself in
the mind, that the owner of the mind is an artist with his mind. When he