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that it is the evidence of God working in the soul. But in addition to these, three simple practical rules may also be given.

1. Our first advice is, Clear your mind of all class prejudices. You are apt (such is human nature) to dislike certain people at first sight. You do not approve of their appearance, their dress, their habits, their opinions. They are, in fact, not your style,' and you cannot bear them. Well, let us suppose that your style is the best style. Even in that case, would it be an improvement to have everybody exactly like you? What a monotonous, wearisome, perplexing, maddening world it would be! Our opinion is, that there would be a general rush to suicide. You may take it for granted that these people, whom you dislike so much, are useful, and in some way ornamental. Were that not the case, they would not be here. Depend upon it, there is much truth in the good old Scottish saying, 'It taks a great mony folk to mak' a warl'. The world could not do without the most insignificant man in it.

2. Our second advice is, Be prepared to find

some good in every one. God made men in His own image. He not only gives them day by day their bodily food, but also their spiritual food. In every one, therefore, however bad he may be, there must be some virtue-some feeling of propriety, or shame, or remorse, or desire for improvement. It may not always appear in the conventional form, but still it is there. Accordingly, it is our duty to refrain from condemning any one at first sight as totally and irretrievably bad. One of the great charms of the popular American writer, Bret Harte, arises from the fact, that he often takes as his subject the very dregs and offscourings of all nations, who have crowded to the diggings of Western America, and shows that even in them strange and fitful gleams of genuine virtue and heroism occasionally burst forth.

3. Our last and most important advice is, Sympathize with all your fellow-creatures. Put yourselves in their position, and invest yourselves with their circumstances. Look at things from their point of view; and whenever you feel inclined to slight any person, try to fancy what you would have been if

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you had been born and brought up amid the same surroundings. You will come to the conclusion that you would have been very much the same as he is, and you will now be inclined to make less of his faults and more of his virtues than you would otherwise have done. Sympathy is the best of all the poetical graces.

The poet has fancy, has imagination, has the gift of language, but he is sympathy, sympathy personified, a living embodiment of sympathy. Why is Shakespeare the greatest of poets ? Because he has given the fullest and most faithful representation of all classes of mankind. How was he able to do this? Because his sympathy was boundless. His soul was not confined to his own narrow body. It roamed at large, and inhabited the whole of humanity. It entered the hearts of all men, from the king to the clown, felt and understood all their virtues and all their frailties, and represented them impartially and yet lovingly.

This is the way in which poetry ought to be studied. It ought to be read by the light of nature. The student of poetry, like the student of the other fine arts, must be constantly falling back upon nature. He must be ever appealing from his books

to her. For everything in them, he must find, at least, a germ or hint in her. It is true that in poetry there are ideal scenes and characters which have no exact counterpart in nature; but the individual components of these are to be found in the real world. The wholes are ideal, but the parts are real,

and can easily be verified in nature.

By this method alone, then, can poetry be studied properly.

The

student who is content to read books without looking at nature, may understand the letter, but can never thoroughly realize the spirit of poetry.

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in which several persons have been engaged. One narrator is dispassionate and, to a certain extent, unsympathetic. In recalling and describing the event, he looks, as it were, from a distance, and is content to tell in everyday language and in everyday style what the people did and said. But another narrator has the mimetic power, and by his very nature, instead of merely describing the event, is forced to realize it. Divesting himself of his own circumstances and of his own character, he throws himself into the circumstances and characters of the persons he is describing. Imitating in turn the expression, voice, and ideas of each of them, he does the deeds and speaks the words of them all in rapid succession, and acually makes the whole scene real

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