Still, it takes all sorts of people to make up a world, and if a person can't be like Frank's father, it would n't be so bad to be like Faraday.

Frank's father would have been shocked at Faraday's first introduction to the problem of metaphysical speculation. "I remember," he says, "being a great questioner when young." And one of his first questions was in regard to the seat of the soul. The question was suggested in this way. Being a small boy and seeing the bars of an iron railing, he felt called upon to try experimentally whether he could squeeze through. The experiment was only a partial success. He got his head through, but he could n't get it back. Then the physical difficulty suggested the great metaphysical question, "On which side of the fence am I?"

Frank's father would have said that

that was neither the time nor the place for such speculation, and that the proper way to study philosophy was to wait till one could sit down in a chair and read it out of a book. But to Faraday the thoughts he got out of a book never seemed to be so interesting as those which came to him while he was stuck in the fence.

When Frank learned a few lines of poetry, he asked to be allowed to say them to his father.

"I think,' said his mother, 'your father would like you to repeat them if you understand them all, but not otherwise.""

Of course that was the end of any nonsense in that direction. If Frank was kept away from any poetry he could n't altogether understand, he would soon be

grown-up, so that he would n't be tempted by any kind of poetry, any more than his father was.

I am sure Frank's father would have disapproved of the way my philosopher takes his poetry. His favorite poem is "A frog he would a-wooing go," - especially the first quatrain. His analysis is very defective; he takes it as a whole. He

Heigh ho says Rowley

Whether his mother would let him or no
With a rowly-powly, gammon and spinach.
Heigh ho! says Anthony Rowley.

This to him is poetry. Everything is lifted above the commonplace. The frog is no cousin to the vulgar hoptoad whose presence in the garden, in spite of his usefulness, is an affront. He is a creature of romance; he is going a-wooing,-whatever that may be; -he only knows that it is something dangerous. And what a glorious line that is,

Whether his mother would let him or no. It thrills him like the sound of a trumpet. And great, glorious Anthony Rowley! It needs no footnote to tell about him. It is enough to know that Rowley is a great, jovial soul, who, when the poetry is going to his liking, cries “Heigh ho!” and when Rowley cries "Heigh ho!" any philosopher cries "Heigh ho!" too, just to keep him company. And so the poem "with a rowly-powly, gammon goes on and spinach," and nobody knows what it means. That's the secret.

Now I should not wish my philosopher always to look upon A frog he would a-wooing go" as the high water mark of poetical genius; but I should wish him to bring to better poetry the same hearty relish he brings to this. The rule should be,

Now good digestion wait on appetite,
And health on both.

When I see persons who upon the altar of education have sacrificed digestion, appetite, and health, I cannot but feel that something is wrong. I am reminded of an inscription which I found on a tombstone in a Vermont churchyard:

Here lies cut down like unripe fruit
The only son of Amos Toot.

Behold the amazing alteration
Brought about by inoculation :
The means employed his life to save
Hurled him, untimely, to the grave.

Sometimes the good housewife has chosen carefully every ingredient for her cake, and has obeyed conscientiously the mandates of the cookbook. She has with Pharisaic scrupulosity taken four eggs and no more, and two cups of sugar, and two teaspoonfuls of sifted flour, and a pinch of baking powder, and a small teacupful of hot water. She has beaten the eggs very light and stirred in the flour only a little at a time. She has beaten the dough and added granulated sugar with discretion. She has resisted the temptation to add more flour when she has been assured that it would not be good for the cake. And then she has placed the work of her hands in a moderately hot oven, after which she awaits the consummation of her hopes. In due time she looks into the moderately hot oven, and finds only a sodden mass. Something has happened to the cake.

Such accidents happen in the best of attempts at education. The ingredients of the educational cake are excellent, and an immense amount of faithful work has been put into it, but sometimes it does not rise. As the old-fashioned housekeeper would say, it looks "sad."

It is easier to find fault with the result than to point out the remedy; but so long as such results frequently happen, the business of the home and the school is full of fascinating and disconcerting uncertainty. One thing is obvious, and that is that it is no more safe for the teacher than for the preacher to "banish Nature from his plan." Of course the reason we tried to banish Nature in the first place was not because we bore her any ill-will, but only because she was all the time interfering with our plans.

The fact is that Nature is not very considerate of our grown-up prejudices. She does n't set such store by our dearlybought acquirements as we do. She is more concerned about "the process of becoming" than about the thing which we have already become. She is quite capable of taking the finished product upon which we had prided ourselves and using

it as the raw material out of which to make something else. Of course this tries our temper. We do not like to see our careful finishing touches treated in that way.

Especially does Nature upset our adult notions about the relations between teaching and learning. We exalt the function of teaching, and seem to. imagine that it might go on automatically. We sometimes think of the teacher as a lawgiver, and of the learner as one who with docility receives what is graciously given.

But the law to be understood and obeyed is the law of the learner's mind, and not that of the teacher's. The didactic method must be subordinated to the vital. Teaching may be developed into a very neat and orderly system, but learning is apt to be quite disorderly. It is likely to come by fits and starts, and when it does come it is very exciting.

Those who have had the good fortune in mature life to learn something have described the experience as being quite upsetting. They have found out something that they had never known before, and the discovery was so overpowering that they could not pay attention to what other people were telling them.

Kepler describes his sensations when he discovered the law of planetary motion. He could not keep still. He forgot that he was a sober, middle-aged person, and acted as if he were a small boy who had just got the answer to his sum in vulgar fractions. Nobody had helped him; he had found it out for himself; and now he could go out and play. “Let nothing confine me: I will indulge my sacred ecstasy. I will triumph over mankind. . . . If you forgive me, I rejoice; if you are angry, I cannot help it." In fact, Kepler did n't care whether school kept

or not.

Now in the first years of our existence we are in the way of making first-rate discoveries every day. No wonder that we find it so hard to keep still and to listen respectfully to people whose knowledge is merely reminiscent. Above all, it is difficult for us to keep our attention fixed on

their mental processes when our minds make forty revolutions to their one. There, for instance, is the Alphabet. Because the teacher told us about it yesterday she is grieved that we do not remember what she said. But so many surprising things have happened since then that it takes a little time for us to make sure that it's the same old Alphabet this morning that we had the other day. She is the victim of preconceived ideas on the subject, but our minds are open to conviction. Most of the letters still look unfamiliar; but when we really do learn to recognize Big A and Round O, we are disposed to indulge our sacred ecstasy and to "triumph over mankind."

If the teacher be a sour person who has long ago completed her education, she will take this occasion to chide us for not paying attention to a new letter that is just swimming into our ken. If, however, she is fortunate enough to be one who keeps on learning, she will share the triumph of our achievement, for she knows how it feels.

There is coming to be a greater sympathy between teachers and learners, as there is a clearer knowledge of the way the mind grows. But even yet one may detect a certain note of condescension in the treatment of the characterlessness of early childhood. The child, we say, has eager curiosity, a myth-making imagination, a sensitiveness to momentary impressions, a desire to make things and to destroy things, a tendency to imitate what he admires. His mind goes out not in one direction, but in many directions. Then we say, in our solemn, grown-up way: "Why, that is just like Primitive Man, and how unlike Us! It has taken a long time to transform Primitive Man into Us, but if we start soon enough, we may eradicate the primitive things before they have done much harm."

What we persistently fail to understand is that in these primitive things are the potentialities of all the most lasting satisfactions of later life.

---

Browning tells us how the boy David felt when he watched his sheep: Then fancies grew rife

Which had come long ago on the pasture, when round me the sheep

Fed in silence-above, the one eagle wheeled slow as in sleep;

And I lay in my hollow and mused on the world that might lie

'Neath his ken, though I saw but the strip 'twixt the hill and the sky:

And I laughed, "Since my days are ordained to be passed with my flocks,

Let me people at least, with my fancies, the plains and the rocks,

Dream the life I am never to mix with, and image the show

Of mankind as they live in those fashions I hardly shall know."

All this is natural enough, we say, in a mere boy,- but he will outgrow it. But now and then some one does not outgrow it. He has become a man, and yet in his mind fancies are still rife. They throng upon him and crave expression. The things he sees, the people he meets, are all symbols to him, just as the one eagle which "wheeled slow as in sleep" was to the shepherd lad the symbol of a great unknown world. That which he sees of the actual world seems still to him only a strip "twixt the hill and the sky,"

all the rest he imagines. He fills it with vivid color and absorbing life. He peoples it with his own thoughts.

We call such a person a poet; and if he is a very good poet, we call him a genius; and, in order to do him honor, we pretend that we cannot understand him, and we employ people to explain him to We treat his works as alcohol is treated in the arts. It is, as they say, "denaturized," that is, something is put into it that people don't like, so that they will not drink it on the sly.

us.

Yet all the time the plain fact is that the poet is simply a person who is still in possession of all his early qualities. Wordsworth gave away the secret. He is a boy who keeps on growing. He is One whose heart the holy forms Of young imagination have kept pure. Where others see a finished world, he

sees all things as manifestations of a free power.

Even in their fixed and steady lineaments
He traced an ebbing and a flowing mind,
Expression ever varying.

This ebbing and flowing mind with its ever-changing expression is the charm of early childhood. It is the charm of all genius as well. Turn to Shelley's Skylark. The student of Child Psychology never found more images chasing one another through the mind. The fancies follow one another as rapidly as if Shelley had been only four years old. Frank's father I would have been troubled at the lack of business-like grasp of the subject. What was the skylark like? It was

Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun. Then again, it was

It was

Like a star of heaven
In the broad daylight.

Like a poet hidden

In the light of thought.

It was like a high-born maiden, like a rose, like a glow-worm, like vernal showers. The mind wanders off and sees visions of purple evenings and golden lightnings and white dawns and rain-awakened flowers. These were but hints of the reality of feeling, for

All that ever was

Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth

surpass.

We know of religion or at least we have often been told that it is found in the purest ideal in the heart of a child, and that it consists in nurture and devel

opment of this early grace through all the years that may be allotted. The same thing is true of all that concerns the ideal life. The artist, the reformer, the inventor, the poet, the man of pure science, the really fruitful and original man of affairs,

these are the incorrigibles. They refuse to accept the hard-and-fast rules that are laid down for them. They insist upon finding time and room for activities that are not conceived of as tasks, but as the glorious play of their own faculties. They are full of a great, joyous impulse, and their work is but the expression of this impulse. They somehow have time for the unexpected. They see that which

Gives to seas and sunset skies

The unspent beauty of surprise. The world is in their eyes ever fresh and sparkling. Life is full of possibilities. They see no reason to give up the habit of Wonder. They never outgrow the need of asking questions, though the final answers do not come.

When to a person of this temper you repeat the hard maxims of workaday wisdom, he escapes from you with the smiling audacity of a truant boy. He is one who has awaked right early on a wonderful morning. There is a spectacle to be seen by those who have eyes for it. He is not willing out of respect to you to miss it. He hears the music, and he follows it. It is the music of the

Olympian bards who sung
Divine ideas below,
Which always find us young
And always keep us so.

THE standing of short stories in the literary market is peculiar. Editors of periodicals clamor for more; publishers of books shrink from accepting any. Editors know that readers enjoy them; publishers proclaim that buyers of books do not. Are they both right? Is the public indeed so inconsistent as to like a thing, delectable in itself, only when served in a particular way?

I do not think so, for the truth is that collections of good short stories may have a satisfactory commercial success. Indeed, the whole apparent disagreement between the editor and the publisher is no more than this: the editor can sell poor short stories, and the publisher cannot. Thus, the editor can take B's thin little tale, clap to it three or four others as varied as possible, flank it with interesting articles, trick it out with illustrations, make it in short, a part of that agreeable lottery, the popular magazine, and dispose of it to the public. But when B takes a dozen or so of his harmless fictions to the publisher and gets them (if he can) printed as a book, what happens? Between the covers, as between two mirrors, his insignificant personality repeats itself in a monotonous and diminishing perspective. His nullity is only too many times exhibited, and the disconcerting truth appears that the magazines in which he figured were bought not because of him, but in spite of him. I spoke of the magazine as a lottery: well, B is one of the blanks. Of course his book will have no sale.

B, and perhaps his publisher, may conclude from this that short stories will not sell in book form; but the inference is rash. For, as a matter of fact, they will and do. Poe, who never wrote a novel, unless the Narrative of A. Gordon Pym

may be called one, is, I believe, still read. Kipling, who has failed as a novelist, nevertheless has a certain vogue as a writer of short stories. Miss Wilkins was enjoyed, even in the days of A Humble Romance. Miss Jewett has a modest popularity not based upon her novels. The name of any one of these writers on the cover of a magazine would sell copies. They are not blanks in the lottery. And when their work is collected, it still is saleable. For people like a good story, even when short. Has it not paid to dig Wandering Willie's Tale out of the novel where it lies hidden, and print it separately?

But there is another grade of storyteller, not so good as these, but better than the unfortunate B. It is his case which the publisher has in mind when he speaks slightingly of the market for short stories. For he recognizes that, whereas the novel in book form, even when mediocre, has a certain advantage over the novel running as a serial, the volume of short stories must be of superior merit to compete with the stories in the magazines. He knows, too, that whereas a novel may be clumsily constructed and still be popular, and even valuable, the short story cannot live through "popular quality" alone, but absolutely requires the artist. Often enough he will find it wise to decline a volume of short stories really superior in literary merit to the novel he might accept.

Two pleasing implications which lie in all this are precisely the reason for the foregoing exposition. The first is that the short stories which get into book form have survived an exceptional scrutiny, and are consequently more likely to be of exceptional merit; the second is that their popular success (if they win it) means, as