."

This is only by way of preface to saying that the need in our educational
philosophy, or, at any rate, in our educational practice, as in
agriculture, is the need of the _fallow_.

It will be known to philologists, even to those who have no agricultural
knowledge, that the "fallow field" is not an idle field, though that is the
popular notion. "Fallow" as a noun meant originally a "harrow," and as a
verb, "to plough," "to harrow." "A fallow field is a field ploughed and
tilled," but left unsown for a time as to the main crop of its
productivity; or, in better modern practice, I believe, sown to a crop
valuable not for what it will bring in the market (for it may be utterly
unsalable), but for what it will give to the soil in enriching it for its
higher and longer productivity.

I employ this agricultural metaphor not in ignorance; for I have, out on
these very prairies, read between corn-husking and the spring ploughing
Virgil's _Georgics_ and _Bucolics_, for which Varro's treatises furnished
the foundations. And I have also, on these same prairies, carried Horace's
_Odes_, in the spring, to the field with me, strapping the book to the
plough to read while the horses rested at the furrow's end.

Nor do I employ this metaphor demeaningly. Nothing has so glorified for me
my youthful days on these prairies as the associations which the classics,
including the Bible, gave to them on the farm; and also in the shop, I may
add, for it was in the shop, as well as on the farm, that I had their
companionship. When learning the printer's trade, while a college student,
I set up in small pica my translation of the daily allotment of the
_Prometheus Bound_ of Aeschylus, and that dark and dingy old shop became
the world of the Titan who "manward sent Art's mighty means and perfect
rudiment," the place where the divine in man "defied the invincible gesture
of necessity." And nothing can so glorify the classics as to bring them
into the field and into the shop and let them become woven into the tasks
that might else seem monotonous or menial.

In a recent editorial in the _New York Times_ it was said that the men and
the times of Aristophanes were much more modern than the administration of
Rutherford B. Hayes. But this was simply because Aristophanes immortally
portrayed the undying things in human nature, whereas the issues associated
with this particular administration were evanescent. The immortal is, of
course, always mode