"A COLLEGE FETICH."
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pression of the Greek into the common medium of our own tongue furnishes a discipline of the highest order in the choice and use of English.
Still further classical imagery, scenes, events and names are woven into the tissue of all modern writing. The great writers of English have drawn their inspiration largely from the classics. In fact they have exercised so vast an influence on modern thought, so many of our current ideas are traceable to them, that much of our modern literature cannot be thoroughly understood and appreciated without some knowledge of Greek.
One chief excellence of Greek literature is originality. It shows us how man set about and carried to supreme perfection systematic thinking. Hellenic poetry and prose arose from spontaneous creative genius. The spirit of Greece has ever been in the world's history, the incentive to all high creative efforts in art and literature.
Besides it gave the world method. The Greek spirit has always remained truly scientific. In ethics, in logic, in geometry, the work done by the Greeks remains, to this day, a basis of study,. It is in Greek historians and Greek orators, those laborers in the earliest democracies of the world, that we read political lessons directly useful to our own times. Neither the christian dogma nor the history of the christian church can be understood without reference to the character and work of the Hellenic mind. In fact, owing to this very connection, the Hebrews and the Greeks divide between them the intellectual supremacy, the culture and the moral worth of modern spiritual life.
But the highest value of all literature is not so much in form or method, as in substance. Bacon told us this when he called the study of mere words the first distemper of learning. The thoughts of the Hellenes, their aspirations, their ambition, their religious faith, the very substance of the Greek spirit formulated their literature. Their wonderful ideality had its first flowering in the epic, the lyric and the most profound insight of the drama. Philosophy
came as its maturest creation; philosophy with its countless variety of phases, but with Socrates and Plato standing in the forerank, for all time "the masters of those who know." These men, divine worldordering forces, strove to bring to mankind from the world of ideas, perfect forms of goodness, beauty, truth wisdom, ideal happiness and holiness. What better study for the youthful men and women of to-day than their perfect forms and ideals?
Yet the human element in Greek literature exerts a subtile charm. "Wherever literature consoles sorrow or assuages pain; wherever it brings gladness to eyes which fail with wakefulness and tears, and ache for the dark house and the long sleep, there is exhibited, in its noblest form, the immortal influence of Athens." This humanity teaches us that the history of our race is one. Thus the study of the ideas of the Hellenic rises to the study of the philosophy of history, to the philosophy of human life.
No one who looks back on that marvelous fertility, that exhaustless variety of the rarest gifts of thoughts, can believe that, in the divine ordering of the world, it was intended to begin and end in the land which gave it birth, that these words of thinkers had fulfilled their mission when they delighted or instructed the audience which first heard them in the sunny "white-pillared cities by the Aegean or Sicilian Sea." As long geological epochs prepared those material resources which were to minister to the physical civilization of great nations, so this exuberance of intellectual wealth seems to have been designed to sustain the life of the spirit in all future generations.
We could better take from English literature Shakespeare and Milton, or from the German Goethe and Schiller, than from the world's treasures the literature of ancient Hellas. "In the pages of its texts, saved by centuries of diligence, the scholar by his quiet lamp reads back, through long perspectives of perfect thought, to the very beginning of things intellectual. He gains a view-point where all lines of his