"It floods out of sight the unsightly, muddy grounds of life's petty, anxious, doubting moments, and makes immortality a present fact, lived in and realized. It locks the door against the outer world of discords, contradictions, importunities, beneath the notice of a soul so richly occupied; lets 'Fate knock at the door' - Fate and the pursuing Furiesand even welcomes them, and turns them into gracious goddesses, Eumenides! When man has tasted of that higher life, and has given himself up to it, at least for a time, until he has become acclimated to it, then man, no matter what may be his party or creed, will belong to the harmonic and anointed bodyguard of peace, fraternity, and good-will. His instincts have all caught the rhythm of that holy march, and the good genius leads. Somehow the smallest fiber, the most infinitesimal atoms of his being, are magnetized and attracted to the pole star of unity; he has grown attuned to the believing mood, just as the body of a violin or the walls of a concert-room become gradually seasoned into smooth vibration."

When the individual men and women who make up this nation have finally grown attuned to this believing, loving mood which leads to the realization of the brotherhood of man in its highest phases, I am certain that thoughtful and studious men, observing and understanding the cause and effect, will say that much of this result is due to the influence of music upon our lives, and consequently upon the life of the nation.

THE INFLUENCE OF POETRY IN EDUCATION PRESIDENT WILLIAM M. BEARDSHEAR, STATE COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE AND MECHANIC ARTS, AMES, IA.

In its widest range poetry treats of nature, man, and God. There are no distinct boundary lines separating these. Poetry has two essential elements—one is thought intensely felt; the other is thought artfully expressed. It has its fullest fruition when these are happily blended. "A vein of poetry," says Carlyle, “exists in the hearts of all men. No man is made altogether of poetry. We are all poets when we read a poem well." The phenomena of human experience and the ideals of poetry and nature are complementary parts of an arch wanting a keystone. Poetry is the putting in of the keystone, and, like Cicero's conception of reason, it is the chain that links God and man. The true aim of poetry is variously interpreted. Professor J. C. Shairp says:

Το appeal to the higher side of human nature, and to strengthen it, to come to its rescue when it is overcome by worldliness and material interests, to support it by great truths set forth in their most attractive form-this is the one worthy aim, the adequate end of all poetic endeavor, and this it does by expressing in beautiful forms and melodious language the best thoughts and the noblest feelings which the spectacle of life awakens in the finest souls.

Our own Steadman, in dedicating the first chair of poetry in America, said: "Poetry is rhythmical, imaginative language expressing the invention, taste, thought, passion, and insight of the human soul." Poetry has most largely to do with the realm of the perfect, altho it may include in greater or less degree the other principles of rational intuition.

Goethe probably had this relation in mind when he said: "The beautiful is higher than the good. The good is included in the beautiful." The worthiest poetry is born when the poet, with his soul high-wrought, sees, as in a new vision, the harmonious relation that nature bears to the human mind, and in the enrapture of the inspired scene expresses this beauty in melodious and truthful language. Every thinker remembers what new relations of truth and beauty at times dawn on his mind with the distinctiveness of a creation's morn. In some such way the poet grasps what has been called "the open secret" of the universe. "Open to all," says Carlyle, "seen by almost none." The untutored savage strolls with stolid indifference amid sublime mountain scenery, along wonderfully terraced cañons, and down beautiful, musicful woodland streams; while he who approaches these scenes with the life of an artist is impassioned with their voiceful thought and ravished with their evolving graces. He who sits inattentive in a great auditorium with unnurtured ear may not be fit for treason, stratagems, and spoils, yet his smile of incredulity is in painful contrast with the inspirited soul, sunlit by the truth and exalted with the sweet harmony of a grand chorus from one of the masters. St. Augustine once said: "Being thus admonished to return to myself, I entered into my inner self, Thou being my pride, and I was able to do so because Thou wast my helper, and I entered and beheld the eye of my soul (such as it was) even above my soul, above my mind, a light unchangeable." So the largest-minded poet approaches nature, man, and God, and in the "light unchangeable" reveals the beauty of higher, exquisite thought and skill.

The greatest

Such an environment poetry brings to education. force of the schoolroom and of the world is personality. An inspirer must be inspired in turn. Spirits feed on spirits. Poetry furnishes to the educator and the youth ambrosial food essenced from earth, air, sky, man, and God. Prince Metternich said: "Revolutions begin in the best heads and run steadily down to the populace." The most epochal and marvelous revolutions of history occur in the schoolroom. The evolutions of civilization come thru the revolutions of the brain of some masterful teacher or character. "Alexander [the Great] left his schoolmaster, living Aristotle, behind him, but took dead Homer with him," sleeping with a copy under his pillow every night because in the characters of Achilles, Ulysses, Nestor, Ajax, and Hector he found fortitude, heroism, and virtue more forcefully taught than was possible in the acute, cold abstractions of Aristotle. Some books are the livest things in the world, and of such poetry furnishes the largest proportion, for "poets are the rulers of men's spirits more than the philosophers, whether mental or physical."

Poetry brings to education a universal language. Some months ago, standing by trees on the banks of a South American river, environed by

flowers of most exquisite loveliness and fragrance, were several Spaniards and an American. We didn't know each other's language, but there was a language in the beauty of the coloring and the inspiration of the perfume that kindled our emotions with a mutual spirit of a universal language. Those flowers were both English and Spanish, and beside us we might have selected representatives of all the tongues of the earth, and they in turn would have understood this mother-tongue in the flowers of God. So with the kingdom of men: in the profoundest depths of character are written by the Almighty the elemental principles of universality. As the poet in the meanest flower that blows could find thoughts even too deep for tears, so in the humblest creature among the children of men there are thoughts superlative and profoundly too deep for tears. The poet is to this universal language in inspirational verbiage much like the epistles of the saints - known and read of all men. Tennyson, in his "In Memoriam," reaches the deepest depths of the soul's experience in severance from its friend. Heights and depths of human experience, like Victor Hugo's intellectual primacies, have no secondaries, but all are equals. In the sublimities and profundities of "In Memoriam" is a language common to all tongues of men. Wordsworth, "the whole world's darling," with his triune theme, nature, man, and God, has disclosed the universal mind teeming thru all matter, and translated earth, sky, woodlands, lakes, animal, man, and Deity with characters universal as love of truth and beauty, and hallowed as a scripture from heaven. Milton fathoms the human soul to its ocean beds with a plummet line of poetic thought, revealing the war of the spirits in heaven and the wars of the spirits of earth so fully that the human tragedy, as perpetual as the life of the race of man, of paradise lost and paradise regained, longs for no other master-portrayal in the annals of time, and has contributed beyond compare to the securement of his own definition of education, as fitting a man to "perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously all the offices of life, both public and private, in peace and in war."

Poetry reveals the uncommon ness in the common things of everyday environment. The Millers, the Locks, and the Mannings, not only in the landscapes of Emerson's description, but in all portions of the earth, have an eye and a desire largely for the harvest's grain, while a revealer of nature will find a property in the horizon, an integration of field and woodland, to which warranty deeds give no title. One man looks on the modest humblebee of the meadow merely as fit for a dog to snap or a foot to crush into the earth, while the man who sees and understands with the poet this "yellow-breeched philosopher" will have to tell him "Of Syrian peace, immortal leisure,

Firmest cheer, and bird-like pleasure."

A humble birch tree seems of little worth, especially to the ax of the woodman, but a seer of nature can stand in its presence and find the thought-keys of many sylvan revelations as he addresses it :

"Thou art to me like my beloved maiden,

So frankly coy, so full of trembly confidences:

Thy shadow scarce seems shade, thy pattering leaflets
Sprinkle their gathered sunshine o'er my senses,

And Nature gives me all her summer confidences."

The water-fowl is an object of smallest attention upon the part of most people. A few gather around it the pleasure of the hunt, but to him who in the love of nature holds communion with her visible forms this humble water-fowl becomes a thoughtful messenger of the highest destiny, and the poet sees that

"He who, from zone to zone,

Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,

In the long way that I must tread alone,
Will lead my steps aright."

The chambered nautilus to the general observer is but a small object of idle curiosity; to the scientist a mere specimen of a once abundant race of mollusks; but to the poet and we are all poets, only, like the stars in glory, differing in magnitude-this mollusk becomes a child of the wandering sea, to call forth thanks for a heavenly message, as thru the deep cave of thought he hears a voice that sings:

"Build thee more stately mansions, my soul,

As the swift seasons roll!

Leave thy low-vaulted past!"

The mind as emotion is a kind of understanding that often penetrates farther into truth than the emotions will furnish adequate words to unfold and express. The poet is a philosopher by seership. Some minds can. tell more than they know, and others know more than they can tell. Poetry leads men to see, but does not deal with conduct; yet to succeed it must deal with life morally. Like the Holy Scriptures, it does not give -ologies, but furnishes the philosophies of all life. The poet is able to give these emotions interwebbed of the soul a language fit to their intrinsic worth. This is why the songs of a nation outweigh its laws. The churches have sung more truth into the people than they have preached. Keble's "Christian Year" in the devotions of the church. ranks equal with the "Imitations of Christ." Patriotism thru the poets has sung itself into the lives and hearts of this American people creditably with polemics and wars made in defense of our institutions. It ministers to child and man alike. The poet takes many of our emotions that are languageless and gives them a vocabulary of their own. Authors and publishers who are producing and collecting poetry for the youth, relating to love of country, love of nature, man, and heaven, are worldformers into a higher life.

Poetry brings the priesthood of nature into education. Poetry educates by revelation and illumination. From a single bird's nest is interpreted a poetic beauty for all bird nests as the poet enhancingly sings:

An oft unintruding guest,

I watched her secret toils from day to day;
How true she warped the moss to form the nest,
And modeled it within with wood and clay.
And by and by, like heath-bells gilt with dew,

There lay her shining eggs as bright as flowers,
Ink-spotted over, shells of green and blue :

And there I witnessed in the summer hours
A brood of Nature's minstrels chirp and fly,
Glad as the sunshine and the laughing sky.

A spring morning is a wide-flung portal to heaven's palace-gate, and Wordsworth gives form to the language of your heart:

But now the sun is rising calm and bright:

The jay makes answer as the magpie chatters,

And all the air is filled with pleasant sound of waters;

All things that love the sun are out of doors.

And likewise Celia Thaxter :

For who the pleasure of spring shall tell,

When on the leafless stalk the brown buds swell,

When the grass brightens and the days grow long,

And little birds break out in rippling song?

Who that from childhood has been in love with the honest countenance, cheerful manner, brave spirit, and soulfully sweet notes of the bluebird, calling to mind how the old home garden looked, and feeling anew the summer air of the days of his singing,

"When earth seemed heaven with buds and bloom,

South wind and sunshine and perfume,"

-who that has thus experienced feels not helped by heavenly ministry. thru the poet as he verses:

Never was sweeter music

Sunshine turned into song,

To set us dreaming of summer,

When the days and the dreams are long.
Winged lute that we call a bluebird,
You blend in a silver strain
The sound of the laughing waters,
The patter of spring's sweet rain,

The voice of the wind, the sunshine,

And fragrance of blossoming things.

Ah! you are a poem of April,

That God endowed with wings.

Then take the experience of outdoor life when a child first draws off his shoes in spring, and coatless and hattess skips over the greensward:

"No fountain from its rocky cave

E'er tripped with foot so free;
She seemed as happy as a wave,
That dances on the sea."