Committing to memory beautiful pieces of literature, either prose or
poetry, for recitation before a friendly audience, acting charades or
plays, and reading aloud with vivacity and sympathetic emotion, are
good means of instruction at home or at school This collection contains
numerous admirable pieces of literature for such use. In teaching
English and English literature we should place more reliance upon
processes and acts which awaken emotion, stimulate interest, prove to
be enjoyable for the actors, and result in giving children the power of
entertaining people, of blessing others with noble pleasures which the
children create and share.

>From the home training during childhood there should result in the
child a taste for interesting and improving reading which will direct
and inspire its subsequent intellectual life. The training which
results in this taste for good reading, however unsystematic or
eccentric it may have been, has achieved one principal aim of
education; and any school or home training which does not result in
implanting this permanent taste has failed in a very important respect.
Guided and animated by this impulse to acquire knowledge and exercise
the imagination through good reading, the adult will continue to
educate him all through life.

The story of the human race through all its slow development should be
gradually conveyed to the child's mind from the time he begins to read,
or to listen to his mother reading; and with description of facts and
actual events should be mingled charming and uplifting products of the
imagination. To try to feed the minds of children upon facts alone is
undesirable and unwise. The immense product of the imagination in art
and literature is a concrete fact with which every educated human being