The division is of course arbitrary, but it is after all one which comes naturally enough in actual work. One division will not infrequently pass into another, and no one could be so foolish as to suppose literature is to be taught by a cut and dried mechanical process of any sort. The division is convenient, however, at least for purposes of discussion; and no argument should be needed to prove that in many cases the pupil cannot even read intelligently the literature he is supposed to study until he has had some preparatory instruction.

The vocabulary of any particular work must first be taken into account. We do not ask a child

to read a poem until we suppose him to have by every-day use become familiar with the common words it contains. We should remember that the poet in writing has assumed that the reader is equally familiar with any less common words which may be used. It is certainly not to be held that the writer intends that in the middle of a flowing line or at a point where the emotion is at its highest, the reader shall be bothered by ignorance of the meaning of a term; that he shall be obliged to turn to notes to look up definitions, shall be plunged into a puddle of derivations, allied meanings, and parallel passages such as are so often prepared by the ingenious editors of school texts. These things are well enough in their place and way; but no author ever intended his work to be read by any such process, and since literature depends so largely on the production of a mood, such interruptions are nothing less than fatal to the effect.

I remember as a boy sitting at the feet of an elder sister who was reading to me in English from a French text. At the very climax of the tale, when the heroine was being pursued down a wild ravine by a bandit, the reader came to an adjective which she could not translate. With true New England conscientiousness she began to look it up in the dictionary; but I could not bear the delay. I caught the lexicon out of her hands, and without having even seen the French or knowing a syllable of that language, cried out: "Oh, I

know that word! It means 'blood-boltered.' Did he catch her?" She abandoned the search, and in all the horror of the picturesque Shakespearean epithet the bandit dashed on, to be encountered by the hero at the next turn of the romantic ravine. I had at the moment, so far as I can remember, no consideration of the exact truth of my statement. I simply could not bear that the emotion of the crisis should be interrupted by that bothersome search for an exact equivalent. The term 'blood-boltered' fitted the situation admirably, and I thrust it in, so that we might hurry forward on the rushing current of excitement. This, as I understand it, is the fashion in which children should take literature. Few occasions, perhaps, are likely to call for epithets so lurid as that in which Macbeth described the ghost of Banquo, but the spirit of the thing read should so carry the reader forward that he cannot endure interruption.

When work must be done with glossary and notes in order that the text may be easily and properly understood, this should be taken as straightforward preliminary study. It should be made as agreeable as possible, but agreeable for and in itself. When I say agreeable for itself, I mean without especial reference to the text for which preparation is being made. The history of words, the growth and modification of meanings, the peculiarities and relations of speech, may always be made attractive to an intelligent class; and since here and throughout all study of literature students

are to be made to do as much of the actual work as possible, this part is simple.

The amount of time given to such learning of the vocabulary might at first seem to be an objection to the method. In the first place, however, there is an actual economy of time in doing all this at first and at once, thus getting it out of the way, and saving the waste of constant interruptions in going over the text; in the second, it affords a means of making this portion of the work actually interesting in itself and valuable for its relation to the study of language in general; and in the third place it both fixes meanings in mind and allows the reading of the author with some sense of the effect he designed to give by the words he employed.

It is hardly necessary to say that in this matter of taking up the vocabulary beforehand many teachers, perhaps even most teachers, will not agree with me. The other side of the question is very well put in a leaflet by Miss Mary E. Litchfield, published by the New England Association of Teachers in English: