order that the student may not be hampered by the difficulty of rhyme at the beginning, our first exercise may be in blank verse, taken in connection with some blank-verse poem that we are studying. Let us suppose that it is the selections from Bryant's translation of the "Odyssey," the "Ulysses among the Phæacians" before mentioned. We may give the class a start by proposing a subject, and providing a first line. The subject is to be "The Sirens"; the moment chosen being when they sang their luring songs to Ulysses as he and his sailors sailed by their dread abode; or, if the students prefer, the sailors may be Jason and his Argonauts (the writer once read to his class William Morris's dialogue between the Sirens and Orpheus). It will not do to pitch the note too high, and so an introductory line like this may be suggested:

And as they neared the shore they heard the songs and if a second line is desirable, we may continue:

Of Sirens sweetly singing from the bay...

The class will be asked to suggest the next line; and by means of suggestion and criticism, we may build up a little stanza of five or six lines that will have served to give courage and stimulus to our young craftsmen. Let them now be asked to take either the same subject or any other and produce a dozen lines or so. Of course, there will be all sorts of ludi

crous bungling; but it will all be worth while. To many the work will be a first revelation of the charm and significance of verse.

The advance from blank verse to the couplet and the quatrain is a natural step forward. The quatrain we have found it convenient to take in connection with the study of Gray's "Elegy"; the couplet, when Goldsmith's "Deserted Village" is studied. A simple exercise in connection with Gray is to attempt a description of morning twilight hours and sunrise, with the sounds and sights common to country life at dawn. The subject is discussed, and various experiences are contributed, and, almost before it is aware, the class has on hand a stock of material which may be worked up into verse form. Similarly with Goldsmith's "Deserted Village." The exercise may be an attempt to describe some deserted building or spot which the students have known, or some person or place after the manner of the descriptions of the village parson and schoolmaster in Goldsmith's poem.

At this point we may begin the study of the more formal and compact types of poem. We have usually begun with that dainty form of French verse, the triolet, a copious supply of models for which may be found in the little volume of "Ballades and Rondeaus" in the Canterbury Poets, compiled by Mr. Gleason White. In fact, it may be well to take this

form, and to work it before the quatrain and couplet are handled. Here again, of course, the results will be anything but satisfactory; the dainty triolet will be so roughly handled that the teacher's taste and conscience will be sorely tried. It will be well, as a first exercise, to give a motive or subject, and to supply the first two lines; for example, if we should be working at the time on Milton's shorter poems, we may take a cue from "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso"; we have also used the "Merchant of Venice" and secured creditable triolets on Portia, setting as a first line

Love laughed in her eyes. .

The triolet may lead on into the single quatrain embodying an epigram. Models may be drawn from William Watson, Landor, and Emerson. After this the progression may be successively through the sextain, the octette (ottava rima), the Spenserian stanza, and, finally, the sonnet. We have managed to secure a passable sonnet from about fifty per cent of our senior class.

If circumstances favor, along with these exercises we may work in a little imitative work, a ballad or narrative poem at times, and a few parodies, using Bayard Taylor, Owen Seaman, and other masters in this line. Now the class will produce its class song, and sometimes verses for special commemorative occasions, Memorial Day, Christmas, May Day, etc.

Such in brief is the plan we ourselves have followed. Without some such course in versification, we regard the work in English as lacking one important means of culture, and one efficient aid in securing good results in linguistic expression.

CHAPTER XIX

THE QUESTION OF FORMALISM IN METHOD

WHAT We have to say in these supplementary or summarizing words on method is said as the result of experience, not alone in teaching boys and girls in the Elementary School and the High School, but also in the teaching and training of teachers, including teachers of the higher and lower grades in our public schools.

The chief burden of our counsel, when we are asked for an opinion on the subject, is that what we chiefly need for the improvement of our English teaching is a broader, richer, and more thorough literary training and culture for our teachers.1 It must be

1 We provide for ourselves a little shelter from any possible downpour of protest against our attitude by quoting these words from a recent address of President Hadley, of Yale: "The chief difficulty is that we have at present so few teachers who are competent to give good instruction in English except through the medium of Latin or Greek. Over and over again have I heard men argue for the extension of English teaching in place of the classics, when the speakers showed by their diction, their grammar, and their rhetoric, that they had not the least conception of what good English expression really was. When we have a body of teachers who are ready to teach English with equal seriousness, and are able to suppress that vastly greater body who handle it mechanically or carelessly, then, and not till then, shall we be able to talk of superseding the classics in our educational system. Under present conditions they re

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