BEST THOUGHTS ABOUT POETRY.

You will find poetry nowhere, unless you bring some with you.
-Joubert.

Poetry is music in words; and music is poetry in sound; both excellent sauce, but those have lived and died poor who made them their meat.-Fuller.

The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but to feel truly.-F. W. Robertson.

Poetry is the music of thought conveyed to us in the music of language.-Chatfield.

Words become luminous when the poet's finger has passed over them its phosphorescence.-Joubert.

A poet must needs be before his own age, to be even with posterity.
-James Russell Lowell.

Poetry is not made out of the understanding. The question of common sense is always, "What is it good for?" a question which would abolish the rose and be triumphantly answered by the cabbage. -J. R. Lowell.

The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; and, as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.-Shakespeare.

Of all kinds of ambition, that which pursues poetical fame is the wildest.-Goldsmith.

Poetry is the sister of sorrow; every man that suffers and weeps, is a poet; every tear is a verse; and every heart a poem.-Andre.

Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.-Coleridge.

Poetry and consumption are the most flattering of diseases.
-Shenstone.

Thoughts that breathe and words that burn.-Gray.

Poetry reveals to us the loveliness of nature, brings back the freshness of youthful feeling, revives the relish of simple pleasures, keeps unquenched the enthusiasm which warmed the spring-time of our being, refines youthful love, strengthens our interest in human nature by vivid delineations of its tenderest and softest feelings, and, through the brightness of its prophetic visions, helps faith to lay hold on the future life. Channing.

A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing, examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.-Coleridge.

Poets are never young in one sense. Their delicate ear hears the far-off whispers of eternity, which coarser souls must travel towards for scores of years before their dull sense is touched by them.-Holmes.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.-Plato.

An artist that works in marble or colors has them all to himself and his tribe, but the man who moulds his thoughts in verse has to employ the materials vulgarized by everybody's use, and glorify them by his handling.-Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Poetry is the utterance of deep and heartfelt truth.-The true poet is very near the oracle.-E. H. Chapin.

For poesy is love's chosen apostle, and the very almoner of God. She is the home of the outcast and the wealth of the needy.—Lowell. You arrive at truth through poetry; I arrive at poetry through truth.-Joubert.

Whatever the poets pretend, it is plain they give immortality to none but themselves; it is Homer and Virgil we reverence, not Achilles or Æneas.-Swift.

Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.-Plato.

Poetry is itself a thing of God. He made his prophets poets; and the more we feel of poesie do we become like God in love and power. -Bailey.

Poesy is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.-Denham.

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest minds.-Shelley.

Poetry is the art of substituting shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.-Burke.

The world is full of poetry. The air is living with its spirit; and the waves dance to the music of its melodies, and sparkle in its brightness.-Percival.

Poetry is most just to its divine origin when it administers the comforts and breathes the thoughts of religion.-Wordsworth.

Poets are all who love and feel great truths and tell them.-Bailey. Poetry is something to make us better and wiser by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth which God has set in all men's souls.-J. R. Lowell.

Poetry, with all its obscurity, has a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions than the art of painting.-Burke. All that is best in the great poets of all countries, is not what is national in them, but what is universal.-Longfellow.

Poetry begotten of passion is ever debasing; poetry born of real heartfulness, always ennobles and uplifts.-A. A. Hopkins.

One merit of poetry few will deny; it says more, and in fewer words, than prose.-Voltaire.

He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child.-Macaulay.

They learn in suffering what they teach in song.-Shelley.

EDUCATION.

CLASSICS, PRO AND CON.

"A man who is ignorant of foreign languages is ignorant of his own."-Goethe.

"As a hawk flieth not high with one wing, even so a man reacheth not to excellence with one tongue."-Roger Ascham.

"There was speech in their dumbness; language in their very gesture."-Shakespeare.

Many persons who have not time or opportunity to master several languages excuse their inefficiency in their own language by referring to such quotations as are given above. Others who would otherwise persevere, become discouraged by this class of ideas, usually held out by classical scholars. Even yet, the classical colleges persist in holding the degree of Master of Arts as superior in rank to any degree obtained for completing an elective course, or any regular technical course that does not involve the dead languages; even though such elective or technical course requires as much or more time for its completion. The principal force of their argument is that English is largely derived from the Latin and Greek, and to understand a word properly, one should understand its remote derivation.

It is true that about thirty per cent. of English words are derived from Latin, either directly, or through the French, Spanish or Italian, while about four per cent. are from the Greek; but it is also true that more than half the Latin and nearly all the Greek words are restricted to scientific or technical uses, leaving but a small percentage of conversational English that is of other than Anglo-Saxon origin.

In presenting the best thoughts of best thinkers along this line, we quote from Wm. Mathews, LL. D., in "Words; Their Use and Abuse," a part of a chapter on "The Secret of Apt Words." One special reason for making this selec