would have been really instructive. We hold that for every separate man, the select books which he reads most fondly, should be quite separate. We always regard such remarks as Isaac Barrow's on books as not a little unreal, "He that loveth a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counsellor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter." Now, a favorite book is not a friend. You are fond of it, but it is not fond of you. It is much less than a friend, but also not a little more. It does not spring proposals upon you as friends do. It is warranted not to startle. You know perfectly the kind of thing you will find there, though you often find more, and sometimes, perhaps, a little less than you had expected to find. It does not feel hurt if you weary of it and close it. It does not insist upon its own view and controvert yours. Whether it is a wholesome counsellor or not, depends altogether on whether you like works which show you your weaknesses, or only those which help you to feel your strength. Whether it is an effectual comforter or not, depends on whether or not its drift is comfort or irony—an answer to doubt or a stimulus to doubt.

All this sort of language about books seems to us conventional. Books are favorites when they refresh and inspire, not when they counsel and comfort. If the present writer, for instance, made a list of his favorite books, how surprised some of his friends would be! Very high on his list would stand Grimm's "Volksmährchen," not Grimm's "Popular Tales," because some prime favorites, the old monkish legends, are seldom rendered in the English versions. Now, what is the charm of a book like that? If it is to be called a faithful friend, certainly it is not so even in the sense in which a dog or a bird is a faithful friend. It gives no sign of attachment. It obtrudes no remonstrance. It tenders no sympathy. It simply gives a delightful picture of the naïveté and childlikeness of the mediæval world. The simplicity of the tales of wonder, the shrewdness and weirdness, with the singularly simple wisdom, of the stories of Death, Satan, and the Saints, are of a kind which fascinate the mind in this skeptical century, and refresh it with the picture of a very primitive humor and a very primitive conscience. As Arnold says of Wordsworth, not very truly, but as we can say of Grimm's "Volksmährchen" with perfect truth

The cloud of mortal destiny,
Others will front it fearlessly,
But who like him will put it by?

That is what we very often want of a book, to put by "the cloud of mortal destiny." And that is what Homer, and Herodotus, and Grimm's "Volksmährchen" alike give us a complete refreshment of spirit. In such writers we find once more the old, childlike attitude of man, without missing his noble aspirations, his inextinguishable curiosity, and his awestruck recognition of the heavens above and the hell beneath him. Again, take a very different book, which probably a great number of our readers have never read, Cardinal Newman's "Callista." That which makes "Callista" so refreshing to the present writer is its wonderful restoration of the age in which Christianity was struggling with the Roman paganism, and giving men at once new life and a new indifference to death. To the mind of any one who has fully enjoyed that book, it is a book not to read once, but year after year, with an ever-growing sense of obligation. It does not, indeed, restore to us the delight with which a renewed vision of the childlike stage in man's growth always fills us, as do the great imaginative works of the ages of legend, and the stories of marvel in the Middle Ages. But it makes us see as no other work of fiction has ever made us see, what Christianity had to do in the age of the martyrs, and what it really did. In fact, it brings before our eyes the inward significance of the greatest of the historical tragedies in the whole story of our race. In a lesser degree, such stories as Sir Walter Scott's "Abbott" or "Old Mortality" do us just the same kind of service. They give us some impression of the inner life of the great dynastic and religious conflicts of past times, and suggest something of what they meant to the hearts of those who were the chief actors. We cannot regard even the greatest of Shakspeare's plays as offering the same kind of refreshment. No greater work than "Hamlet" was ever produced by the human intellect; and "Hamlet," no doubt—with many others of Shakspeare's plays—is a great resource whenever the mind is at its highest point of energy. But then its imaginative flight is too independent of real conditions to render it possible that we should follow it with the ease with which we follow the creations that fill up known historical conditions-that vivify the well-marked testimony of history. And even these great books are not counsellors, not comforters, not friends. They are stimulants and tonics to the feeble imagination of man, and enable us to connect in some way the present with the past—or, what is still more difficult, and requires a higher energy for which we are only now and then adequate, they enable us to connect the present with the future. But the best of books are resources, not friends-re

sources which, if properly used, open our eyes, nerve our imaginations, stir our sympathies, and sometimes, though comparatively rarely, shame our supineness and our miserable ambitions. But in any case, the books to love and cherish are not those which give us the largest measure of knowledge, but those which awaken the activity of our truest self.- The Spectator.

Broader Culture Needed.

One of the sorest temptations that beset our common school teachers, and professional educators in general, is the inclination and tendency to become mere specialists, in the narrow sense of the termmere technical schoolmen. Their duties are so many, their time so fully occupied with the routine work of the school room, that they are naturally apt to confine their studies and activities, even their ambition, to the attainment of proficiency in what they consider the most immediately neccessary, practical qualifications for the specific task before them.

The same temptation is felt to a greater or less degree in all professions. That is why there are so many narrow-minded theologians, bigoted scientists, lawyers who know nothing outside of Kent and Blackstone, doctors who are like fish out of water in polite society. But in no profession is such a one-sidedness of de, velopment more inexcusable, more harmful, than in the professional educator. He above all others needs to be many-sided. It is essential to the true fulfillment of his lofty calling to be a man of genuine, broad culture. That this need is not sufficiently realized and appreciated among our teachers, superintendents and directors, and in our normal schools, is one of the great weaknesses of our public school system. Our teachers have as a rule been open to the reproach of being mere "walking text-books," nothing "but teaching machines." While possessed of great technical skill, while being adepts in arithmetic, in grammar, in geography, in penmanship, etc., they often have not enjoyed the respect of cultured society, or have not been admitted to it at all, because utterly lacking that breadth and comprehensiveness of mental attainment, that general information, and especially that refinement of the sensibilities, of taste and feeling, which are the fruits of a well-balanced and symmetrically developed mind and character, the marks of the only real

This lack has, of

education, the characteristics of true culture. course, greatly lessened the influence of our teachers outside of the school-room.

But its injury to their comfort and usefulness has been even greater in their specific work of teaching itself. Not only has it been the chief cause of the purely mechanical methods, the bare-text-bookteaching, that is still too prevalent; it has made the attainment of the only correct ultimate aim of all our education an impossibility. For that aim is not the mere training of a few of the intellectual faculties of our children, but the equal and harmonious development of all of them, and of their tastes and feelings, their judgments, desires, sympathies, and aspirations as well-in a word, the laying of the foundations for the highest culture of their whole character. And this cannot be done by rule. Its first condition is the possession of such culture by the teacher himself. He can never impart what he does not possess. Its chief means is personal example and influence. Nothing cultivates the finer, higher nature of the pupil so surely and readily as simple intercourse with a teacher of true culture and refinement. The mere presence of such an one in the school-room is an education. As was said once of a lady of rare refinement, as well as of literary and heart culture, "To know her is a liberal education."

And even in the work of technical instruction, experience abundantly shows the value of a liberal culture on the part of the teacher. In the long run he is the best teacher of arithmetic, geography, grammar, reading, history, who knows most besides, outside of these special branches. Who are our best teachers to-day? The nar rowly technical pedagogues? No; but those who have the most liberal education, the widest, broadest culture. They are the ones who rise most steadily in the profession. They are the ones who are coming rapidly to fill all the highest positions, simply because they are the most competent and best fitted for them.

It is therefore to our Normal students' and our teachers' own immediate interest to take advantage of every means for their liberal culture, and to use them diligently, as a necessary, indispensable part of their work and study. Not to do it only incidentally, when they happen to get the time, but regularly, systematically, to take the time for it. It is essential to their true success as teachers, and to the highest usefulness and continued progress and improvement of their noble profession. The means of paramount importance to all true culture is the right use of the right kind of literature. It is essential

to become familiar with the classic productions of the past and present. Therefore do we give all possible attention to the best works of general literature, the leading essayists, poets, historians, critics, novelists, all books acquaintance with which is necessary to them who would become the best teachers, real educators. Believing that on the whole he is the best teacher who is the best reader of the best literature, we want to help our readers by guiding them to the best books and warning them against worthless ones; and shall endeavor to do all we can to merit their confidence in us as honest and earnest guides.-Pennsylvania School Journal.

The Age we Live in.

[James R. Joy, in the Chautauquan.]

As an age of discovery, the present is worthy of comparison with any preceding century. Franklin pushing his way through the ice of the Northwest passage in 1847, and Nordenskjöld forcing the Northeast Passage around Asia Europe in 1877, may well be classed with Columbus crossing the summer seas from Palos to San Salvador in 1492. The Arctic explorers of Greely's party penetrated to 83° 14' north latitude, or within four hundred and fifty miles of the pole. The long sought source of the Nile was found by Speke in the magnificent Lake Nyanza which contests with Lake Superior for the honor of being the largest body of fresh water on the globe. Stanley has traced the Congo from its head-waters in Eastern Africa to its mouth in the Atlantic, two thousand eight hundred miles distant, and from his explorations has grown the Congo Free State with a million square miles of territory and forty millions of people-an opening into Central Africa for Christianity and trade.

Not only have new lands been discovered, but commerce, aided by steam and electricity, has moulded the older countries to its purposes. Railroads, canals and steamships have transformed both routes and methods of transportation. The United States contains one hundred and twenty-five thousand miles of railroads, and there are five lines from the Atlantic to the Pacific. There are, in all, three hundred thousand miles of railroads on the globe-sufficient to build a single track from the earth to the moon. Engineering science has kept pace with the railroad, bridging rivers and tunnelling mountains. Three tunnels, the Mont Cenis, St. Gotthard, and Arlberg, respectively eight, nine, and six miles in length, connect the roads of