as in a tree, of myriad cells. Each cell is a complex organization. Though bound up with the life of its fellows, it is a center and promoter of special activities. It has its own round of existence. It is responsive to light, heat, electricity, and mechanical disturbance. In this sense even these prophetic entities feel. We do not claim for them memory-a high animal endowment, a supreme gift to man and some higher animals. Perhaps it is as well they are spared the pang of recalling their separations and multitudinous trials. On the other hand, if in their long life they could recollect, record, and transmit historic scenes, how many a graphic picture they could bestow! Take the great trees of California, the baobab of Africa, the dragon tree of Teneriffe, the chestnut of Mt. Etna, the gum trees of Australia, the oaks of Sherwood Forest-what tales they could tell of the "old time before us"!

A Friend in Need

How well we love the friend in need,
Whose sympathy most kind,

When trials come to overwhelm,

We always seem to find.

They ever have such loving words,

And sweetest comfort bring

When sorrow, from the aching hearts,
Such misery would wring.

They wipe away the tears of grief,

And blessings bring their friends,

As with the comfort of their love
Such tenderness e'er blends.
They never flee when sorrows come,
But then will be most true,

And prove how much their loving hearts

Will try to do for you.

Such are the friends mankind will need,

And to them ever cling;

For they are ones that to their souls

Most happiness will bring.

They will not tire and weary friends,

As fickle hearts will do,

Who quickly go when sorrow comes,

And prove they are untrue.

Moorestown, N. J.

MARTHA SHEPARD LIPPINCOTT.

66

The Use of the Model in English

Composition

CATHARINE A. DOLE, LEBANON, N. H.

NY imitation is bad art," says Mr. Arlo Bates. This seems to be the opinion of most teachers of English. All acknowledge the helpful influence of good reading, but would not encourage conscious imitation. Imitation, they tell us, destroys originality. Pupils are much more likely to contract the faults. of the style by imitation than they are to acquire its virtues. No text-book in rhetoric, so far as I know, published prior to 1902, no edition of any one of the works included in the college required reading, suggests passages for imitation.

In venturing to present the other side of this subject, I merely voice certain questionings arising from dissatisfaction with the results of my own experience. Careless, dilatory, boys and girls who call their English "a snap," and come into class half the time with their lessons unprepared, will write far better papers than the most conscientious and painstaking workers if the home influence in reading and conversation in the case of the shirkers is good and in the case of the workers is bad. Unconscious imitation seems to outweigh all our teaching. Could not conscious imitation be made to counteract the influence of unconscious? These questionings present themselves for our consideration, with a greater possibility of value when reinforced by the well-known opinion of Stevenson. After relating how he has "played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Beaudelaire, and to Obermann," how he wrote one essay three times, first in the manner of Hazlitt, second in the manner of Ruskin, and third in that of Sir Thomas Browne, he concludes with a paragraph which I take the liberty of quoting in full:

"That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write; whether I have profited or not, that is the way. It was so Keats learned,

and there was never a finer temperament for literature than Keats'; it was so, if we could trace it out, that all men have learned; and that is why a revival of letters is always accompanied or heralded by a cast back to earlier and fresher models. Perhaps I hear some one cry out, But this is not the way to be original.' It is not, nor is there any way but to be born So. Nor yet, if you are born original, is there anything in this training that shall clip the wings of your originality. There can be none more original than Montaigne, neither could any be more unlike Cicero; yet no craftsman can fail to see how much the one must have tried in his time to imitate the other. Burns is the very type of a prime force in letters; he was of all men the most imitative. Shakespeare himself, the imperial, proceeds directly from a school. It is only from a school that we can expect to have good writers; it is almost invariably from a school that great writers, these lawless exceptions, issue. Nor is there anything here that should astonish the considerate. Before he can tell what cadences he truly prefers, the student should have tried all that are possible; before he can choose and preserve a fitting key of words, he should long have practiced the literary scales. And it is only after years of such gymnastics that he can sit down at last, legions of words swarming to his call, dozens of turns of phrase simultaneously bidding for his choice, and he himself knowing what he wants to do and, within the narrow limit of a man's ability, able to do it."

Stevenson, you will notice, calls such imitation "practicing the literary scales." Miss Jordan, head of the English department at Smith College, writes, "I never advise imitation except for the most technical practice; i. e., five-finger exercises."

Now, if imitation-conscious imitation-be considered to perform the same office for the author that scales and five-finger exercises do for the pianist, then such imitation may be most useful to the high school. For, as the symphony and sonata are beyond the comprehension and knowledge of most high school boys and girls, so the literary value of anything they can be expected to produce must be a promise rather than a finished performance; and the lessons assigned will, in a considerable measure, be in the nature of five-finger exercises and scales.

All our achievement is a sort of compromise between the ideal and the practicable, between what we wish we could do and what, as a matter of fact, we are capable of doing. The people for whom "there is no such word as fail" are those who use rare good judgment in what they attempt. The teacher of English in the high school, therefore, will be wise if, at the outset, he acknowledge his own limitations, and try to realize the limitations of his pupils. High school girls and boys are still children. They are still in the age of receptivity; their minds are eagerly occupied with understanding and assimilating new ideas. Ask a class of high school pupils for their own ideas, their own opinions, and you shall find that, outside of very narrow range, they have none. They are ready to accept your opinions with approving nods, and to adopt them as their own. This attitude of mind is what makes them so teachable in all other subjects, but it is an almost insurmountable barrier to anything like authorship. You cannot teach the best way of saying it to the boy who has nothing to say.

As a consequence of the search for subjects that shall prove interesting, and shall result in papers having any sort of excuse for being, the English course has come to include a superficial study of almost every known subject. The boy writing his weekly theme is, for the time being, a student of architecture, literature, history, science, political economy, or what not; ransacking every library, public and private, at his disposal, and making wild demands upon his family for information which he fails to find in books. Such study, however beneficial in its way, is assuredly not the study of English composition, save as all study, all thought, may be considered a sort of composition. Composition is an art. The pupil is not to learn. about something, he is to learn to do something; namely, to give his thought effective and fitting expression.

Now, how do we learn to do anything, from holding our first baby spoon to playing the piano? By practice and am I not right? by imitation. When you learned to sew, my professional sister, your mother took the work from you dozens of times, saying, "No, don't do it that way; see how mother does it." You had to struggle away for yourself, of course, and prick

your fingers and knot your thread; but, in so far as you had any other teacher than experience, you learned from seeing how the work was done by some one who knew how. In proportion to the strength of your desire to learn you imitated, painstakingly, slavishly.

Professor Baldwin of Princeton devotes an entire work on mental development to the attempt to prove that we owe all that we are to imitation, closing the book with the question: "What is the great World Copy, and how did it get itself set?" He says: "It (imitation) enables me, the child, to pass from my experience of what you are to an interpretation of what I am, and then from this fuller knowledge of what I am back to a fuller knowledge of what you are. Further, this process of taking in elements from the social world by imitation and giving them out again by reverse process of invention (for such the sequel proves invention to be-the modified way in which I put things together in reading the elements which I get from nature and other men back into nature and other men again), this process never stops. We never outgrow imitation nor our social obligation to it. Our sense of self is constantly growing richer and fuller as we understand others better, and our understanding of them is in turn enriched by the additions which our private experience makes to the lessons we learn from them."

If in social intercourse we learn to know each other and to know ourselves better by imitation, so also in writing. Let me illustrate by a few simple exercises founded on the college required reading. An exercise in imitating poetry may serve to increase the vocabulary. I do not mean to advocate any attempt to write English verse as university lads used to write Latin verses and Greek odes. But take a simple narrative stanza from The Ancient Mariner,

"Merrily did we drop

Below the kirk; below the hill;
Below the lighthouse top."

There is nothing difficult about the metre; there is only one rhyme. If you wish your boys and girls to appreciate the art