are occasions when its significance and value become especially clear
to me. It was brought forcibly to my mind several years ago by an hour
or two of talk with one who, as truly as any other American, stands as
a representative man of culture; one, that is, whose large scholarship
has been so completely absorbed that it has enriched the very texture
of his mind, and given him the gift of sharing the experience of the
race. It was on an evening when a play of Sophocles was to be rendered
by the students of a certain university in which the tradition of
culture has never wholly died out, and I led the talk along the lines
of the play. I was rewarded by an hour of such delight as comes only
from the best kind of talk, and I felt anew the peculiar charm and
power of culture. For what I got that enriched me and prepared me for
real comprehension of one of the greatest works of art in all
literature was not information, but atmosphere. I saw rising about me
the vanished life, which the dramatist knew so well that its secrets
of conviction and temperament were all open to him; in architecture,
poetry, religion, politics, and manners, it was quietly rebuilded for
me in such wise that my own imagination was stirred to meet the talker
half-way, and to fill in the outlines of a picture so swiftly and
skilfully sketched. When I went to the play I went as a contemporary
of its writer might have gone. I did not need to enter into it, for it
had already entered into me. A man of scholarship could have set the
period before me in a mass of facts; a man of culture alone could give
me power to share, for an evening at least, its spirit and life.

These personal illustrations will be pardoned, because they bring out
in the most concrete way that special quality which marks the
possession of culture in the deepest sense. That quality allies it
very closely with genius itself, in certain aspects of that rare and
inexplicable gift. For one of the most characteristic qualities of