achievement is that he learns to do little things well. Give Short Studies in Browning

me rather the boy who sharpens his pencil symmetrically than one who has dreamt the building of a ship.

There is the man who putters at his work. He will never reach the beautiful.

He needs the strong, free, but none the less sure, stroke. Michael Angelo would, perhaps, be a poor hand at needle-work; a restive one, at all events. A man who is finical in his handicraft is pretty sure to be so in his speech, his ideas, his social relations. He can write the Lord's Prayer upon his thumb-nail, but he can neither have nor express a strong, spiritual emotion.

The manual training school is a tonic for the puttering boy or girl. You may see him at the beginning. He holds his hammer by the neck and the stroke is ineffective. He works with a dull chisel sooner than take time to sharpen it. He grinds his model down with sandpaper sooner than risk a tool cut at all. This pupil is expressing his symptoms in this mouse-like nibbling, and the best possible corrective is the manual training course he has entered.

The Nääs sloyd system best comprehends the esthetic in manual training. The making of models with a sloydic degree of excellence might easily degenerate into a matter of finical detail, but never if the Nääs philosophy is kept in view. Do little things well. Take time to be right. Sharpen your own knife instead of borrowing your neighbor's. Clean up your own litter. A bad job when finished, leaves a bad Such unwritten precepts as these make for beauty in expression and just as surely for esthetic conception.

taste in the mouth.

The hopeful thing in all teaching is this splendid fact: That by brightening one facet of character we polish the whole gem. A drop of ink will tint a bucket of water. Relation is nowhere else so perfectly operative as in the soul of a child, so if I lead him to appreciate the absolute squareness of a right angle, I have drawn him a great step toward the appreciation of general truth reappearing in any other correct adjustment. For making his corner square he is a little nearer perceiving that a bird in the tree is prettier than one shot dead and stuffed; a little nearer feeling that an outlaw is not of the beautiful because he is out of adjustment. Honesty becomes to him the best policy simply because it is the reasonable, the sane policy.

The most effective homilies ever preached are too subtle to take form in words. The sun is punctually at the zenith, gravitation is unremitting, fire yesterday, today, tomorrow, did, does and will burn the fingers. After we have learned these things through direct sense experience they are with us forever and are more than mere admonishment. They go to their various places as bricks in our edifice of faith. Manual training accelerates this construction. The pupil comes to know the square and circle as absolute, changeless entities. He knows that cutting against the grain will ruin the surface, not now and again, but always. He knows that seven-eighths will not answer for an inch and that a slip of his tool will remorselessly work its due havoc. The content of literature is useful in corroborating these perceptions after they are gained and in eliciting generalizations from them. It can not institute them primarily.

The truth of a whole life is distilled from this accretion of innumerable circumstantial truths. A soul permeated with this generalized truth is a beautiful soul. It is empowered to see the beautiful, to act upon it, to live in it, and is essentially esthetic. To say that manual training is the only road to this estate would be absurd; but to claim such as its characteristic tendency, is to abide within the limits of demonstrated fact.

Probe your methods for faults, and, if any are found, as some certainly will be if you probe mercilessly, out and away with them. If you have a darling method or idea regarding your work, turn the fiercest searchlight precisely on that. Criticise others keenly; criticise yourself severely, even savagely. Do not fear to learn, or to change, or to admit that you have been wrong. Supt. Andrews, Chicago

ANNIE W. SANBORN
Poems of Religion

VI*

T is a tribute to the universality of his power that although Robert Browning's poetry is often radiant with spiritual force and always sternly recognizant of the ethical operation of law, he is never numbered among the religious poets. He has produced a number of poems of which religious sentiment is profoundly the essence, and a study of those in which Christianity finds expression seems to reveal a faith as reverent and fervid as it is various in mood and comprehensive in sympathy, yet the fact remains that he is never designated a religious poet.

This is partly because, wherever religion became his theme. he wrote of it, as he did of all forces, almost invariably in its relation to a given personality. Just as Fra Lippo Lippi and Andrea del Sarto express art as it is filtered through their respective natures, so David in "Saul," and thinker in "Christmas Eve," give voice to religious faith as Johannes Agricola in his "Meditation," and the modern. temperament and environment have combined to evolve it in them expression of the creed of its author. And yet the convicWe have no right to regard even the last as an tion is irresistible, as we complete the reading of these three poems, that the voice of Browning speaks more clearly in the first and third than in the second.

A Group of Religious Poems

It is possible to arrange, for the purpose of study, an arbitrary cycle of the poems of which religion is the theme. To this end it will be convenient to ignore the order in which they were written and to arrange them in a kind of historical sequence.

Take “Saul" first, as the prophetic vision of Christ, and follow it with the group of poems that reflect nearly contemporary types of the Christian era, namely "Cleon," "A Death in the Desert," and "An Epistle of Karshish." This group in turn may be followed with "Johannes Agricola in Meditation," which represents the musings of a medieval mystic and doctrinaire. Next, phases of the modern mood are to be found in "Bishop Blougram's Apology "Christmas Eve and Easter Day." The former is the selfjustification of the man who stands nominally for doctrines which he can hardly be supposed to believe in all literalness; the latter is a double poem representing religious crises in two lives.

and

Finally, there is the epilogue to "Dramatis Personæ," a trilogy in which three distinct spiritual attitudes are described. The third part of this epilogue is mentioned by Mrs. Orr as representing, as nearly as he ever phrased it in any single poem, the religious belief of Robert Browning. There is not one of this group that does not repay close and exhaustive study.

The Song of Prophecy

In "Saul," Browning has pictured wifh equal vividness and subtlety of imagination that episode in Jewish history which is so magical in its appeal, the restoring of Saul by David's song. The boy comes from dazzling noonday into the dusky tent. The king, sunk in a terrible, wordless apathy, half leans, half hangs on the tent-prop —" drear and stark, blind and dumb." David unwinds the lilies he has twined about his harpstrings, "lest they snap 'neath the stress of the noontide," and sings.

His first songs are those attuned to the ear of beasts and birds that to which the sheep answer tamely at twilight, that which calls the quail from its mate, and the one which the crickets obey. Next follow the songs of human life -the help-song of the reapers, the funeral dirge, the marriage chant, the priest's chorus. The groan and shudder attest the first stirring of consciousness in his listener and David strikes sharply into that noble exaltation of man's life — "how good . . . the mere living"- and leads up to a ringing challenge of his king's sunken identity, ending with the words, "King Saul."

* Copyrighted, 1899, by Annie W. Sanborn.