th the tale, and another and
another, just as in a construing class. While the boy is reading,
the teacher should _never_ interrupt: he should wait, and return
afterwards upon a line that has been slurred or wrongly
emphasised. When the children have done reading he should invite
questions on any point they have found puzzling: it is with the
operation of poetry on _their_ minds that his main business lies.
Lastly, he may run back over significant points they have missed.

'And is that all the method?'-Yes, that is all the method. 'So
simple as that?'-Yes, even so simple as that, and (I claim) even
so wise, seeing that it just lets the author--Chaucer or
Shakespeare or Milton or Coleridge--have his own way with the
young plant--just lets them drop 'like the gentle rain from
heaven,' and soak in.

The moving Moon went up the sky,
And no where did abide:
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside.

Do you really want to chat about _that_? Cannot you trust it?

The stars were dim, and thick the night,
The steersman's face by his lamp gleamed white;
From the sails the dew did drip--
Till clomb above the eastern bar
The horned Moon, with one bright star
Within the nether tip.

_Must_ you tell them that for the Moon to hold a star anywhere
within her circumference is an astronomical impossibility? Very
well, then; tell it. But tell it afterwards, and put it away
quietly. For the quality of Poetry is not strained. Let the rain
soak; then use your hoe, and gently; and still trust Nature; by
which, I again repeat to you, all spirit attracts all spirit as
inevitably as all matter attracts all matter.

'Strained.' I am glad that memory flew just here to the word of
Portia's: for it carries me on to a wise page of Dr Corson's, and
a passage in which, protesting against the philologers who cram
our children's handbooks with irrelevant information that but
obscures what Chaucer or Shakespeare _mean,_ he breaks out in
Chaucer's own words:

Thise cookes, how they stampe, and streyne, and grynde,
And turnen substaunce into accident!

(Yes, and make the accident the substance!)--as he insists that
the true subject of literary study is the author's meaning; and
the true method a surrender of the mind to that meaning, with
what Wordsworth calls 'a wise passiveness':

The eye--it cannot choose but see;
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where'er they be,
Against o