life. Year after year I must plod through ream upon ream of manuscript that college students write in an effort to learn how to make themselves writers. Bewildering, depressing, maddening, debasing, I should have found this work years ago, but for the growing conviction, which strengthens as the years go by, that the meanest of these works, if we will only let ourselves see it truly, is a very marvellous thing. Careless, thoughtless, reckless as these boys so often are, the most careless, the most thoughtless, the most reckless of all, has put before me an act of that creative imagination for which, as I have said to you before, one can find no lesser word than divine. All unknowing, and with the endless limitations of weakness and perversity, he has looked for himself into that great world of immaterial reality which, just as he knows it, no other human being can ever know; and with these strange, lifeless conventions we call words he has made some image of what he has known in that world which is all his own; and that image begins by and by to arouse within me some conception of what life has meant to him.

Petty enough this thing that life has meant to these thoughtless boys must often seem; yet it is an unspeakably greater thing than the lifeless words in which they have striven to set it forth. And as year after year I have striven to understand what these lame and blundering words and sentences mean, to penetrate the symbol, to grasp the thought, to tell the makers of these feeble elements of style

how they may better the work that seems so worthless, I have found myself year after year more and more aware that what they have done in their little way is what the masters have done in the way that we like to call great. More and more I have come to know that the realities which lie behind the symbols that make the greatest works great are things as far beyond the mere symbols themselves as the thoughtless thoughts of these college boys are beyond the symbols their pens so carelessly scrawl. And year by year there has come to me, amid this work that seems so dreary, the growing knowledge that beyond the ken of the students, and beyond the ken of the greatest of our masters too, lie unending, infinite realms of truth. And these no human power can ever exhaust; here to the end of time human beings may constantly seek farther and farther, with endless hopes of more to come; and here these endless stretches of truth not yet known, and truth perhaps never to be known to human beings, make the work of the greatest of the masters seem almost as small a thing as the work of the pettiest of the pupils. For what either has revealed is but some unspeakably little fragment of infinite eternities.

Technical, dull, lifeless, as all these things I have been prosing about must seem to whoever has not studied them deeply; dull and lifeless, I fear, as I have made them seem to many of you, they are things that lead us by and by into a conviction of the truths of idealism that to some minds could

never come so strongly by any other means. And idealism, I believe, is a truth that cannot be shaken. What we read is but a symbol of the living thought behind it; what we see and know in life are but symbols of some greater, deeper, infinitely more real truth beyond them all, that only in these material forms can be revealed to such beings as we, who are living here on earth. Whatever leads us to such thoughts as this is a thing that leads us to thoughts that make us wiser, better men.

It is this that makes me more and more feel that the work so many of us are trying to do at Harvard College, the work of which I have tried to give you some account, the work of any earnest teacher of this subject-composition that seems to most men so dull, is a work that may rightly claim a place in any system of education, no matter how high it hold its head. If teacher or pupil keep himself down to the symbol alone, he sinks hopelessly into the depths of pedantry. But if teacher or pupil keep himself alive to the truth that what he is striving to accomplish is no less a thing than an act of creative imagination; if he learn to know that in his own little way he is trying to do just such a thing as the greatest of the masters have done before him; if through the symbol his eye learn to seek and to know the infinite reality of truth that lies beyond, he will find that even though technical mastery never come, he will learn more and more the infinite, mysterious sig nificance of that human life that each of us is living

for himself. The old systems strove to bring us to such wisdom by reverent study and sometimes by cruelly irreverent mangling — of the greatest works of the masters. There are minds, and not a few, that can come thither only by such means; but there are other minds, and not a few, I think, who can come thither better by such humbler means as ours: by striving each for himself to do his best. By and by he must come to know how little a thing that is by the side of what he longed to do; and by and by he will find that thus he has come to learn how vast a thing beside the little that the masters have accomplished is the thing for which they have striven. So, by one road as by the other, men may come at last face to face with what most of all wise men love to face, with the infinite realities that lie, and that must forever lie, beyond human ken.

SUMMARY.

Ir has been my purpose to lay before you, as simply and as broadly as I could, the theory of style to which ten years of study have led me. To most people, as I said in the beginning, this matter that we have been discussing seems a question of endless detail, and of detail which may be declared in every case right or wrong. To me, as I have tried to show you, it seems rather a matter governed by a very few simple general principles. The art of composition, like any other art, can be mastered only by incessant, earnest practice and effort; but the principles that should gov. ern the conduct of whoever would learn to practise it, and the ends he should keep in view, seem to me the principles and the ends and no others that I have attempted to lay before you. My task is almost done. There remains for me only to sum up, as briefly as I can, the substance of the eight chapters in which I have striven to tell what I know of the elements and the qualities of Style.

Style, the expression of thought and feeling in written words, must affect readers in three distinct ways,