14 Colorado College Studies. 



But what end shall we set before ourselves that the child 

 shall gain from the reading? " Many teachers have felt," as 

 Mr. Scudder has so pithily put it, " that Pegasus ought to be 

 hitched to a tip cart," that reading should teach history, geog- 

 raphy, biography, science — in other words, that literature 

 should be made to help the child to obtain information, a 

 purely intellectual achievement. But the writer of literature 

 did not write to give information. He wrote because he had 

 to, because it was the great joy of his life to make the product 

 of his imagination live in the written word. And the spirit 

 in which he wrote the book is the spirit in which it should 

 be read. To teach geography by it is to make it tasteless and 

 insipid; to make it a medium of criticism is to make it dead 

 and joyless. The child should learn to delight in it, to read 

 it only for the delight it can inspire. If the child does not 

 like what is given him to read, let his choice prevail, and 

 let the teacher, or parent, study to find what will delight him. 

 Those who persist in trying to harness up Pegasus to practi- 

 cal things may find it necessary to insert in the newspaper 

 the kind of advertisement which Lowell suggests John Bull 

 will some day have to put into the London Times: 



"Lost, strayed or stolen, from the farmyard of the subscriber, the 

 valuable horse Pegasus. Probably has on him part of a new plough 

 harness, as that is also missing. A suitable reward, etc. 



"J. Bull." 



What has been said at once answers the objection that the 

 use of great literature in the schoolroom will kill it for the 

 scholars for all the future. Certainly it will be so killed if 

 the teacher does not know what literature is, and treats it as 

 he would a dry-as-dust text-book. But the teacher who, in- 

 stead, leaves criticism alone, explains only enough to stimu- 

 late the child's interest, and seeks to lead him out into the 

 perennial delights of the great creations — he will never 

 have to bear the accusation of killing a good book. " The 

 great end of literature is not to inform, but to inspire." Let 

 us thoroughly grasp this truth and we shall never again teach 

 literature as it has so often been taught. 



To accomplish what has been set forth will require a wise 

 planning of a child's time. We must remember that a child's 



