me of the selections the connection
or contrast is obvious ("Rabbi Ben Ezra" and "The Rubaiyat of Omar
Khayyam"); in others it is less immediately evident. In some cases the
background is the group of ideas roughly classed under the word
_evolution_; in others it is some characteristic phase of religious
feeling or ethical or theological thought. The contrast in outlook
between the American writers, Emerson and Whitman, and their English
contemporaries is one of which particularly valuable use may be made. The
discovery of these interrelations is what gives zest to the reading for
both parties in the classroom; for neither teacher nor students should the
work take the form of checking off selections on a minutely correlated
syllabus. The course should be pursued on the assumption that the whole is
greater than the sum of the parts: the total impression, the height gained
at the end, the inspiration of the view there disclosed--these are the
goals to be sought for. And the discerning teacher will not be surprised
that the pupil presses him so closely up the ascent.

In reading pursued on this plan what should be emphasized on the side of
history is not the marshaling of fact, of things done, but the war of
thought in one field or another. Without being embroiled in the
controversy for this or that belief, the student examines the battleground
to learn how the battle was fought. He discovers what befell truths,
half-truths, and falsehoods, and under what circumstances of glory or
shame. He sees the period with the unity that genius always gives to a
subject; at the same time he learns how to make the correction that a
piece of contemporary interpretation inevitably requires. On the side of
literature, the student's approach is no less special and with its
appropriate reward. He sees the man of genius primarily in the setting of
his age. The personal adventures and idiosyncracies that often form so
large and so unedifying a portion of the treatment afforded in the
traditional "historical survey course" here fill a modest space in the
background; the attention is concentrated on what this leader did for the
men of his own day. These writers lived intensely in the life of their own
generation; conscious of a clearer perception of the truth and possessing
a voice that men could hear, they sought to lead their companions out of
the wilderness. It is the man of genius speaking with authority to those
of his own time who is here