To reveal this Christian armory, the defences of the soul against the assaults of evil, has been the highest inspiration of our poets. What depth and beauty and impersonation of Christian virtues do we find in "Snow-Bound," "Among the Hills," "Evangeline," "The Conqueror's Grave," "To a Waterfowl," "The Groves were God's First Temples," "The Living Temple," "The Sun Day Hymn," "The Chambered Nautilus," "Vision of Sir Launfal," "The Great Stone Face."
The Bible is not generally admissible as a schoolbook, but the spirit of Christianity, clad in the forms of strength and grace, is immanent in the works of our poets. So universal, so human, so fit to the needs and destinies of men, are the truths of the great evangel, that the prophets and seers of our race drift evermore into the sheltering haven they supply. To drink in these potent truths through poetry and song, to see them enshrined in the imagery and fervor of the sacred masterpieces of our literature, is more than culture, more than morality; it is the portal and sanctuary of religious thought, and children may enter it.
10. The higher products of literature contain an energy that quickens spiritual life in morals, in art, and in religion. To many people, whose lives are submerged in commercial pursuits or in the great struggle to develop and utilize the material resources of the world, these spiritual forces seem vague and shadowy, if not mythical. But there are plenty of heroic souls in the realm of letters, such as Emerson, Scudder, Ruskin, Arnold, and Carlyle, who are not disposed to let men settle down in lazy satisfaction with material good, nor to be blinded even by the splendor of modern achievements in engineering, in medicine, and in the application of electricity. We must at least reach a point of view high enough to perceive the relations of these natural riches to the higher nature and destiny of man.
Scudder says, "It is to literature that we must look for the substantial protection of the growing mind against an ignoble, material conception of life, and for the inspiring power which shall lift the nature into its rightful fellowship with whatsoever is noble, true, lovely, and of good report."
Shelley, in like spirit, says: "The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. The body has then become too unwieldy for that which animates it."
Matthew Arnold, in "Sweetness and Light," while discussing the function of that truer culture and "perfection which consists in becoming something rather than in having something," remarks:—
"And this function is particularly important in our modern world, of which the whole civilization is, to a much greater degree than the civilization of Greece and Rome, mechanical and external, and tends constantly to become more so. But above all in our own country has culture a weighty part to perform because here that mechanical character, which civilization tends to take everywhere, is shown in the most eminent degree. Indeed, nearly all the characters of perfection, as culture teaches us to fix them, meet in this country with some powerful tendency which thwarts them and sets them at defiance. The idea of perfection as an inward condition of the mind and spirit is at variance with the mechanical and material civilization in esteem with us, and nowhere, as I have said, so much in esteem as with us."
11. Judged by these higher standards our writers and literary leaders were not simply Americans. They were also Europeans. The Puritan brought his religion with him, the Cavalier acquired his gentlemanly instincts in the old home, not in the untrodden forests of the New World. Much of what we call American is the wine of the Old World poured into the bearskins and buckskins of the West, with a flavor of the freedom of our Western wilds. Though born and bred on American soil and to the last exemplars of the American spirit, our literary leaders have derived their ideas and inspiration from the literature, tradition, and history of the Old World. It will be no small part of our purpose, therefore, to open up to the children of our common schools the best entrance to the history and literature of Europe. Our own writers and poets have done this for us in a variety of instances: Hawthorne's rendering of the Greek myths, Bryant's translation of the "Iliad" and "Odyssey," a good half of Irving's "Sketch-Book," Lowell's "Vision of Sir Launfal," "Aladdin," and "Prometheus," Irving's "Alhambra," Longfellow's "Golden Legend," "Sandalphon," Taylor's "Boys of Other Countries." Nearly the whole of our literature, even when dealing ostensibly with American topics, is suffused with the spirit and imagery of the Old World traditions. There is also a large collection of prose versions of European traditions, which, while not classic, are still lively renderings of old stories and well suited to the collateral reading of children. Such are "Gods and Heroes," "Tales from English History," "Tales from Spenser," "Heroes of Asgard," "Story of the Iliad and Odyssey."
The transition from our own poets who have handled European themes to English writers who have done the same, is easy and natural; Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome," Scott's "Tales of a Grandfather," "The Stories of Waverley," the "Christmas Carol," Kingsley's "Greek Heroes" and "Water Babies," Ruskin's "King of the Golden River," "Lady of the Lake," "Marmion," "Roger de Coverley Papers," "Merchant of Venice," "Arabian Nights," "Peasant and Prince," Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," "Gulliver's Travels," and others have become by inheritance and birthright as much a part of the American child's culture as the more distinctive products of our own writers. No line can be drawn between those writings which are American and those which sprung from the soil of England and Europe. So intimate and vital is the connection between our present and our past, between our children and their cousins across the water.
These American and European literary products lie side by side in the school course, though the predominating spirit through the middle and higher grades up to the eighth should be American. We have noticed that in the earlier grades most of our classic reading matter comes from Europe, the nursery rhymes, the folk-lore, fables, and myths, because the childhood of our culture periods was in Europe. But into the fourth grade, and from there on, beginning with the pioneers on sea and land, our American history and literature enters as a powerful agent of culture. It brings us into quick and vital contact, not simply with the outward facts, but with the inmost spirit, of our national life and struggle toward development. This gives the American impulse free and full expansion, and fortunate are we, beyond expression, that pure and lofty poets stand at the threshold to usher the children into this realm, founded deep in the realism of our past history and rising grandly into the idealism of our desires and hopes. As we advance into the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades the literature of Europe begins again to increase in quantity and influence, and to share equally with American authors the attention of the children.