er person with the
atmosphere which still palpitates in me when I think of the first
delight of reading at leisure the poems of Maurice and the letters of
Eug['e]nie. I might just as well attempt to make a young man of our time
feel the thrill that came when we were young and first heard the most
beautiful of all love songs--"Come into the Garden, Maud!"

One can hear the amazed laughter, the superior giggles that would arise
from a group of Greenwich Villagers if they did me the honour to read
this page; but the real Quartier Latin has better taste and is not so
imitative--and paraphrases of this lovely lyric still find admirers in
the gardens of the Luxembourg and on the heights of Montmartre.
Tennyson, like De Gu['e]rin, had bent the old classic form to newer usage,
and one can hardly help seeing, in spite of the fact that the admirers
of Swinburne claim this laurel for him, that Tennyson discovered the
secret of making lyrical verse musical while discarding rime. Both
Maurice de Gu['e]rin and Tennyson, who have superficial characteristics in
common, send us back to Theocritus, the most human, the most lyrical,
the most unaffectedly pagan of all the poets who wrote before Pan said
his despairing good-bye to all the Grecian Isles. But what a mixture is
this!--Maurice and Eug['e]nie de Gu['e]rin, Keats, Madame de S['e]vign['e],
Theocritus, and Tennyson, the Elizabethan Campion--and yet they are all
related.

In fact, ladies and gentlemen, I have never read any good book that was
not related intimately to at least a score of other books. It is true
that in a measure a book gives to us what we take to it; and we can only
take much out of it when we approach the group of ministering authors
who alone make life both cheerful and endurable.

The received methods of "teaching" the classics in what people call "the
dead languages" nearly always weaken the faculties of the soul, while
they may develop certain hidden abilities of the mind. This favourite
process of pedagogues very often defeats itself. Mr. Edward Roth
honestly believed that the Roman Empire had risen, declined, and fallen
in order that the Latin language might live! The logical result of this
teaching on the eager young mind, at once logical, ductile, and
obstinate, was to induce it to discover something about the Roman
Empire, in order that it might cease to yawn over the declensions, and
to be bored by prosody; to discover why the glorious Empire had lived