ve been?

Did anybody ever feel the poetic beauty of a rose with greater intensity
for having examined its petals through a microscope, and learned to
classify it scientifically, both as to species and variety?

Did anybody ever learn by scientific rules of grammar and classified
tables of words, to speak a foreign language with the ease and charm of
a child, who picks it up from a stupid governess in one-tenth the time?
The childlike, natural way to learn a language is to absorb it into the
system, almost without effort, until it becomes a part of second
nature--in much the same way that we absorb tunes. Without the slightest
conscious effort, we are absorbing and retaining countless bars of
music, all through our lives--yet can anybody imagine an enlightened
intellect, undertaking to analyze and classify with scientific method
the use of sharps and flats in different kinds of bars, and attempting
to learn them in that form?

Homer's Iliad and Virgil's AEneid are generally regarded as great
masterpieces of literature. They are full of poetic feeling,
imagination, charm and inspiring sentiments. They are still being read
by thousands of boys and girls, every year, but they are being read to
the accompaniment of grammars, lexicons, and the commentary of learned
professors, upon roots, derivatives and obsolete usages. A vast amount
of time and energy is devoted to this undertaking, which is usually
justified on the ground that it affords excellent training for the
intellect. But how about the feelings of admiration and enthusiasm which
works of such great beauty were intended to inspire? Are they exercised
to the same extent? Or is the tendency rather to trammel and divert them
by so much laborious and irrelevant interference?

When we turn to the more personal feelings of the individual, in his
intimate relations with other beings, is not the situation much the
same? Has scientific thought discovered, or devised, any means of
increasing the warmth and tenderness of the human heart? Has the rule
of reason made husbands and wives any more devoted to each other, or to
their friends? It has succeeded in providing a great many people with a
telephone and an automobile, but has it succeeded equally well in
providing them with generous feelings of self-denial and consideration
for others? Or has its tendency, on the contrary, been rather to
interfere with the spontaneous development of such feelings, by
attempting to replac