piritual name and remember that it is Whittier's indignant rebuke of
Webster for his vacillating policy in the slavery agitation, we read it
again with a renewed and more vivid interest. Many things, however, are
so universal that one cares not whether they were written by a Hindoo or
an American, whether they are full of personal experience or drawn with
the fervor of the most ardent imagination. Wordsworth's _Daffodils_
(Volume VII, page 1) would charm us and our hearts would dance as
joyfully if we knew nothing of the pensive poet of the English lakes.

_Sentences._ Words alone are not a sufficient possession. They must be
known in all their relations. A comprehension of the structure of the
sentence is always necessary. A sentence is a unit of thought, an idea
reduced to its lowest terms. It may not be necessary that each sentence
be analyzed strictly by grammatical rules, but it is essential that the
reader should recognize by study if necessary the subject and the
predicate and the character and rank of all the modifiers of each. Even
the practiced reader by unconsciously laying undue prominence upon some
minor phrase frequently modifies the meaning an author intends to
convey. This is particularly true in verse, where the poet, hemmed in by
the rules that govern his meter and his rhyme, varies the natural order
of the elements of a sentence to bring the accents where they belong or
to throw the rhyming word to the end of a verse. The grouping of related
sentences into paragraphs is an aid to the reader and should be noticed
by him till the habit of expecting a slight change in thought with the
indentation of a line becomes fixed and automatic.

_Allusions._ But one may have the most perfect knowledge of all the
words, his comprehension of the meaning of the sentence may be exact and
full, and yet the special thought which the expression carries may never
reach his mind. Ruskin writes: "Gather a single blade of grass and
examine for a minute, quietly, its narrow swordshaped strip of fluted
green. Nothing, as it seems, there, of notable goodness or beauty. A
very little strength, and a very little tallness, and a few delicate
long lines meeting in a point--not a perfect point either, but blunt and
unfinished, by no means a creditable or apparently much cared for
example of Nature's workmanship; made, as it seems, only to be trodden
on today, and tomorrow to be cast into the oven; and a little pale and
hollow stalk,