are like birds, and will not be handled; even hens will not let you touch them like quadrupeds. Nothing was ever so unfamiliar and startling to a man as his own thoughts." His "roving mind" bursts all fetters like cobwebs.

Open Léon Bazalgette's fascinating story of "Henry Thoreau" and go with the great French essayist to the "little room on a top floor of the hive" at Harvard, where "Henry felt out of his element. He was anything but in tune with them. With a secret pride in his plebeian hands, he exaggerated his reserve, his remoteness, his stiffness in the presence of these boys who knew so little of the world of toil. . Besides, he was decidedly rustic in his appearance, this oddly dressed scholarship-holder. He should have been dressed in black; it was the rule of the institution. The colleges see the world in black and he was here to adapt himself to their vision. But the only suit Henry had was a green one which his father had had made for him at great expense, and he was obliged to put it on every morning. There were evenings when as he undressed, he wished that its greenness were still greener so as to be even more conspicuous among all these black backs." Let this coat be a symbol of one who was nicknamed 'the Judge' by his playfellows and who refused to shine when the examinations were given because he found more real education in the college library. He refused to be herded, even at Harvard. He complains, "When I ask for a garment of particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely, "They do not make them so now,' not emphasizing the 'they' at all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates, and I find it difficult to get made what I want, simply because she cannot believe I mean what I say, that I am so rash. . . . We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same." Henry David Thoreau wishes to be clothed so simply that he may lay his hands on himself in the dark.

Henry David Thoreau first anticipates the pioneers in

modern education in his conception of a liberal education as daring to think. Is it not significant that Harvard University is turning her students loose in the library without class obligations for a period? The history of English Literature confirms Thoreau's belief, that a man who learns to love a library is on the highway to knowledge.

The Concord Hermit anticipates our modern conception of education as a process which includes our entire cultural background. Like Ulysses, he understood that we are a part of all that we have seen. He refuses to define education as so many books of Latin, Greek and Natural Philosophy. Consider the pittance paid to expert educators: recall the attitude of your community toward their public schools, as witnessed by their appropriations, and then read again Thoreau's challenge to Concord:

"We boast that we belong to the nineteenth century and are making the most rapid strides of any nation. But consider how little this village does for its own culture. I do not wish to flatter my townsmen, nor to be flattered by them, for that will not advance either of us. We need to be provoked,―goaded like oxen, as we are, into a trot. We have a comparatively decent system of common schools, schools for infants only; but excepting the half-starved Lyceum in the winter, and latterly the puny beginning of a library suggested by the state, no school for ourselves. We spend more on almost any article of bodily aliment than on our mental aliment. (Does not this strike a responsive chord in you?) It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure, if they are indeed so well off, to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives. Shall the world be confined to one Paris or one Oxford forever?" Again he affirms: "Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society. If I were confined to a corner of a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as

large to me while I had my thoughts about me." Does not every educated person's heart glow as he reads, "Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe." Tom Hyde, the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he had anything to say. "Tell the tailors," he said, "to remember to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch." Thoreau knotted his threads. He also felt for the furring and not for the putty, when he nailed laths of thought to his mental houses.

We are hearing much about "the project method" in modern pedagogy. This man who built his own shack at Walden and hoed his own garden, went up and down his world. pleading for vocational training. The extra-curriculum activities of a student educate him! He who made the best pencils in America and built his own boat, also advocated the Hebrew idea of education which is so splendidly illustrated in the life of the Apostle Paul, who combined the trade of tent-making with philosophy and law. The classes of John and Henry spent one afternoon each week in the open air, "the whole crew, masters and pupils, poured out into the woods, plunged into the meadow grass, for the most enlightening of object-lessons." When the school studied surveying, the class practiced in the open air. Thus the laboratory method and the project method were worked out in Old Concord.

The gentle lover of purple fields and white birches humanized teaching in a day that worshipped the rod, indeed the Town Fathers in Concord criticized Henry because he was not wearing out enough rods. He tried to obey their instructions but gave it up: he could not be a bully. When he and John opened their Academy, their pupils found melons, apples, pears and nuts in their desks, placed there by their teacher. To-day we have come to understand that the school is the teacher! We learn most from those whom we like best. Mark Hopkins, a log and a boy hungry for knowledge, still constitute the elements of a university.

We shall mention only one more of the many elements in

the attitude of the Poet-Philosopher toward learning. Henry David Thoreau was not only a perfect pedagog but also a wonderful psychologist. There is little, for instance, in Freud's psychology of dreams which is not found in Thoreau. He says, "Dreams are the touchstones of our characters. . . In dreams we never deceive ourselves, nor are deceived. . In dreams we see ourselves naked and acting out our real characters, even more clearly than we see others awake. Read "Wednesday" in "A Week on the Concord and Marrimack."

The theory of recapitulation may be somewhat modified, but it has not been buried yet. Thoreau says, "The eras which we call history, awake and glimmer in us, and there is room for Alexander and Hannibal to march and conquer." "Like Nathan, we have a 'small edition of Robinson Crusoe' in our heads."

He calls Imagination, "the air of mind." Knowing man's mind, he is not deceived by change. "Civilized man misses no real refinement in the poetry of the rudest era. It reminds him that civilization does but dress men. It makes shoes, but it does not toughen the soles of the feet. It makes cloth of finer texture, but it does not touch the skin. Inside the civilized man stands the savage still in the place of honor. We are those blue-eyed, yellow-haired Saxons, those slender, dark-haired Normans."

It is the sunset hour: the woods glow with light and the sun, like a gentle shepherd, is driving Thoreau and his companions home. "So we saunter toward the Holy Land," comments the Poet, "till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in autumn." Whatever may be the limitations of Henry David Thoreau's thinking, he faced the light of learning, concluding his philosophy of knowledge with these prophetic words: "The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence."

American Notes-Editorial

In building a character, than which there is no problem more necessary in the schools and colleges, there are positive and negative forces that must be considered and utilized, constantly. We should point out this fact to our pupils of all ages. It will help them to discriminate and to strengthen their power to resist that which is wrong, and to exercise their ability to think and do that which is wholesome and noble. Yet some teachers fail to govern, save only by negatives; they are forever telling their pupils what not to do, and scolding them for their delinquencies, but seldom praising their faithfulness and their virtues and successes. If the familiar proverb, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy," is true, it is equally so if we substitute the words "all censure and no praise" in the proverb. We believe that this contention can be quickly and positively proven by any teacher, by trying it out in the schoolroom. And in most schools this prescription would produce a marvelous transformation.

One need only remember his or her own experience when a pupil, to understand the point we are making. Most of us have encountered the teacher who loved to censure, and hated (apparently) to praise, continually. She made life hideous to us. School was prison, and if possible we would have been glad to "break jail" and "run away to sea" or anywhere. And then, in another grade or school, we came under a different teacher, who was kindly and patient and lovable; one who understood us, and showed us how to master the lessons, and ourselves and who made life an opportunity in which we were to grow useful and capable. He or she awakened us and presented such an alluring picture of our possible usefulness and achievements that we buckled down to the school curriculum and astonished everyone,and no one so much as ourselves.

The average boy or girl will almost always go at an undertaking of almost any kind if he is given the initiative, and made to believe that his teacher believes in him and his ability to work out his own salvation in that problem. Give him the problem, thoughtfully, and make him sure of your faith in his ability and your confidence that he will succeed. Then your belief will be a dynamo that will generate electrical energy; and even your credulity will be surpassed.

There is no joy greater, in the profession of the teacher, than that experience. It is one that comes to those who love humanity and who believe that every pupil has possibilities that no one has as yet fully fathomed and awakened,—but that can be reached by love and patience.