several types into which they naturally divide themselves. The child needs stories reflecting accurately his own experiences, and thus acting as a looking-glass for his mind. He needs those narratives of animal and plant life and those narrative descriptions of inorganic phenomena which open for him the doorway of natural science. He needs stories interpreting human nature as he begins to know it stories which depict in strong and simple outline the elemental emotions, the primary motives, and the original moral conflicts of the soul. Above all, he needs those mythic tales which "sport with the fixed conditions of the actual world and present to him a picture of free power over Nature and circumstances." For tales such as these liberate the soul because they celebrate its ideal freedom and prophesy its triumphant career of conquest over itself and the world.

For American children stories of this kind are especially important because as a people we are prosaic, and as Matthew Arnold has frankly told us,

not interesting." The tendency of much so-called education is to kill what little ideality we have. The thoroughness with which we study mathematics and natural science, while neglecting literature,

history, art, and philosophy, tends to enthrall rather than to emancipate our minds, and I honestly believe that not only our individual characters, but our perpetuity as a representative nation depends upon the uplifting of our ideals through the cultivation of imagination. So "give us once again the wishing cup of Fortunatus and the invisible coat of Jack the Giant-Killer," and do you contribute your share toward the evolution of a nation of idealists by telling Harold over and over again the fairy tales you may be sure he will never tire of hearing.

Casting a backward glance over the course of this letter you will become aware that it has unfolded from the simple point made by Froebel that through their savor, odor, sound, form, and color the things of Nature speak to us and tell us what they are. This insight explains our analogical use of the words originally expressive of elementary sensations. Sweet dispositions, sour faces, bitter experiences, fragrant memories, angular character, the circular sweep of deeds, the spirals of thought, the ring of truth, the pitch and scale of feeling, the many words borrowed from the vocabulary of color to suggest emotion are all intimations that we have been blindly aware that in sensation is revealed the

true being of the sensuous object. Still more suggestive is our discernment of spiritual analogues to the different sensuous spheres, and particularly our wide reaching analogical use of the word taste. We speak of taste in dress, manner, life, art, and literature; we praise the man of correct and refined taste, we shrink from him whose tastes are low. · The several uses of the word have this in common, that they all imply the act of comparison. Cultivation in any sphere is characterized by the sensitive apprehension of subtle differences. The musician hears sounds not discernible by the untrained ear, the sculptor perceives gradations of form, the painted gradations of color invisible to the uneducated eye; all three recognize in the several forms of expression a soul hidden from or vaguely apprehended by dimmer eyes and duller ears. Such recognition implies an identity of the essence or soul of the object with the soul of the percipient. Physically we taste only that which we are beginning to assimilate or make over into our own organism, and the same is true spiritually. Our tastes therefore indicate our spiritual affiliations, and our souls are becoming noble or base, fair or foul, as we prefer the noble or base, the fair or foul in life,

manners, literature, and art. We grow into the likeness of the things we love, and our genuine attractions and repulsions define our characters. Realize this truth and you will understand that the cultivation of taste is one important phase of education, and will inquire for suggestions as to the ways and means of leading children to love the sweet, the beautiful, and the reasonable.

If it be true that through their qualities the things of Nature reveal their essence, then Nature is a revelation to sense of the invisible realities of spirit. Of all delusions the most fatal is that which holds to the contradiction of inner and outer, and imagines that the essence of things can be different in character from their manifestation. How often are being and seeming set in sharp contrast! how fondly do we hug the conceit that we are something better, nobler, purer than we appear! Once for all sweep that illusion away. What we act we are, and

our lives are the revelation of our souls. So is it also with Nature. She is that which she appears to be, and as we study history we find that to men of all ages and races she has told the truth about herself. It was she who by her setting suns, her fading flowers, her dying animals wakened in the soul a

consciousness of the transitoriness of all finite things and stirred the longing for something which would not pass away. It was she who held up before man his own image as conquering hero and returning wanderer. It is she who in these later days is telling to all who have ears to hear that she is mind manifest. The revelation is clear, but the eyes of men have waxed gross and their ears are dull of hearing. Therefore the great revelation needs its interpreters. Best of these are the poets and artists, and the shortest definition of æsthetic education is that it is the process by which the intuitions and affections of elect souls are made the intuitions and affections of all souls.

It is universally conceded that Greece is the fatherland of literature and art, but many of us do not connect this distinction with the fact that in fair Hellas men first began to inquire in the depths of their own souls for the hidden meaning of Nature. "The Greek spirit," says Hegel, “regards Nature as something foreign to itself, in which, however, there is something friendly to itself. Its attitude toward Nature is one of wonder and presentiment, of curious surmise and eager attention. It looks upon Nature as incitement, and in the emo