"It's not poetry when I translate
it!" said the boy. I look back at my own schooldays, and remember the
bare, stately class-rooms, the dry wind of intellect, the dull murmur
of work, neither enjoyed nor understood; and I reflect how small a
part any fanciful or beautiful or leisurely interpretation ever played
in our mental exercises; the first and last condition of any fine sort
of labour--that it should be enjoyed--was put resolutely out of sight,
not so much as an impossible adjunct, as a thing positively
enervating and contemptible. Yet if one subtracts the idea of
enjoyment from labour, there is no beauty-loving spirit which does not
instantly and rightly rebel. There must be labour, of course,
effective, vigorous, brisk labour, overcoming difficulties, mastering
uncongenial details; but the end should be enjoyment; and it should be
made clear that the greater the mastery, the richer the enjoyment; and
that if one cannot enjoy a thing without mastering it, neither can one
ever really master it without enjoying it.

What we need, in education, is some sense of far horizons and
beautiful prospects, some consciousness of the largeness and mystery
and wonder of life. To take a simple instance, in my own education. I
read the great books of Greece and Rome; but I knew hardly anything of
the atmosphere, the social life, the human activity out of which they
proceeded. One did not think of the literature of the Greeks as of a
fountain of eager beauty springing impulsively and instinctively out
of the most ardent, gracious, sensitive life that any nation has ever
lived. One knew little of the stern, businesslike, orderly, grasping
Roman temperament, in which poetry flowered so rarely, and the arts
not at all, until the national fibre began to weaken and grow
dissolute. One studied history in those days, as if one was mastering
statute-books, blue-books, gazettes, office-files; one never grasped
the clash of individualities, or the real interests and tastes of the
nations that fought and made laws and treaties. It was all a dealing
with records and monuments, just the things that happened to survive
decay--as though one's study of primitive man were to begin and end
with sharpened flints!

What we have now to do, in this next generation, is not to leave
education a dry conspectus of facts and processes, but to try rather
that children should learn something of the temper and texture of the
world at certain vivid points of