must be secured mainly by personal
effort. The richest and most accessible material for this highest
education is furnished by art; and the form of art within reach of
every civilised man, at all times, in all places, is the book. To
these masterpieces, which have been called the books of life, all men
may turn with the assurance that as the supreme achievements of the
imagination they have the power of awakening, stimulating, and
enriching it in the highest degree. For the genuine reader, who sees
in a book what the writer has put there, repeats in a way the process
through which the maker of the book passed. The man who reads the
"Iliad" and the "Odyssey" with his heart as well as his intelligence
must measurably enter into the life which these poems describe and
interpret; he must identify himself for the time with the race whose
soul and historic character are revealed in epic form as in a great
mirror; he must see life from the Greek point of view, and feel life
as the Greek felt it. He must, in a word, go through the process by
which the poems were made, as well as feel, comprehend, and enjoy
their final perfection. In like manner the open-hearted and
open-minded reader of the Book of Job cannot rest content with that
noble poem in the form which it now possesses; the imaginative impulse
which even the casual reading of the poem liberates in him sends him
behind the finished product to the life of which it was the immortal
fruit; he enters into the groping thought of an age which has perished
out of all other remembrance; he deals with a problem which is as old
as man from the standpoint of men who have left no other record of
themselves. In proportion to the depth of his feeling and the vitality
of his imagination he must saturate himself with the rich life of
thought, conviction, and emotion, of struggle and aspiration, out of
which the greatest of the poems of nature took its rise. He must, in a
word, receive into himself the living material upon which the unknown
poet worked. In such a process the imagination is evoked in full and
free play; it insensibly reconstructs a life gone out of knowledge;
selects, harmonises, unifies, and in a measure creates. It illuminates
and unifies knowledge, divines the wide relations of thought, and
discerns its place in organic connection with the world which gave it
birth.

The material upon which this great power is nourished is specifically
furnished by the works which it