carries over into their spirits the truths of the books, and these
truths thus become inherent.

=College influences.=--She teaches life, albeit through the medium of
subjects and books, because she knows life. Her college work did not
consist in the gathering together of many facts, but in accumulating
experiences of life. Many of these experiences were acquired
vicariously, but they were no less real on that account. Her generous
nature was able to withstand the most assiduous efforts of some of her
teachers to quench the flames of life that glowed in the pages of books,
with the wet blanket of erudition. She was able to relive the thoughts
and feelings of the authors whose books she studied and so make their
experiences her own. She could reconstitute the emotional life of her
authors and gain potency through the transfusion of spirit. Her books
were living things, and she gleaned life from their pages.

=Reading and life.=--She can teach reading because she can read. Reading
to her is an experience in life. The words on the printed page are not
meaningless hieroglyphics. They are the electric wires which connect the
soul of the author with her own, and through which the current is
continually passing. When she reads Dickens, Tiny Tim is never a mere
boy with a crutch, but he is Tiny Tim, and, as such, neither men nor
angels can supplant him on the printed page. She knows the touch of him
and the voice of him. She laughs with him; she cries with him; she prays
with him; she lives with him. In her teaching she causes Tiny Tim to
stand forth like a cameo to her pupils, with no rival and no peer. This
she can do because he is a part of her life. She has no occasion either
to pose or to rhapsodize. Sincerity is its own explanation and
justification.