me, and the years,
Among new men, strange faces, other minds."

"From the great deep to the great deep he goes."

"Authority forgets a dying king."

"An agony
Of lamentation, like a wind that shrills
All night in a waste land, where no one comes,
Or hath come, since the making of the world."

There never was a more beautiful comparison than the following:

"Like some full-breasted swan
That, fluting a wild carol ere her death,
Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood
With swarthy webs."

FOOTNOTES:

[189-1] _Haec fabula docet_ means _This fable teaches_. It is with these
words that the "Morals" of the old Latin fables begin.

CHAPTER IX

CLOSE READING OR STUDY

It is largely because story reading may so easily become careless
reading, that prejudice against fiction is found in many minds. In the
preceding pages there have been suggested many ways by which story
reading may be made profitable, and yet all these methods may be used
without calling for that close, intensive reading which we usually call
study. You may lead a child to read _Rab and His Friends_ for all the
purposes we have suggested, and yet he may have passed over without
understanding them many a word, phrase or even sentence. It is possible
that there are whole paragraphs that convey little meaning to him. This
is certainly not an unmixed evil, for it is well that a child should not
exhaust the possibilities of such a masterpiece when he first reads it.
In fact, it is a good thing for children frequently to read great
literature even when much of it is quite beyond their comprehension. It
will pique their curiosity, and some time they will return with wiser
minds and broader experience to interpret for themselves the things that
once were obscure. It is no sin for a child sometimes to pass over a
word he cannot pronounce or does not understand. There could be few more
certain ways of destroying his taste for reading than to require him to
stop and find the meaning of every new word he meets. Sometimes the
meaning will become evident a little later from the context, and in
other instances he will understand well enough without the troublesome
word.

What has been said does not signify that the habit of skipping new words
or of avoiding difficult paragraphs is a good one. It does mean,
however, that sometimes the practice should b