aloud to your children at your fireside or to the class and put your very life’s blood into it?  I remember some things that a little girl teacher in Massachusetts read to me a great many years ago, and there is a dent in my old heart still.  Try it some day.  They cannot understand the poem, but they feel it.  It has gone deeper than the intellect.  It has gone into the heart and through the heart, it has got hold of the will and it has transfigured the spirit and the whole being.  In this way you are certainly teaching literature; nobody can deny that.  You have awakened a new interest.  You lead and inspire the adolescent to share your very best and highest enthusiasm.  After you have done that a few times your pupils will demand the best; they won’t be content with anything poor.

The highest human thing in the end is character, and character is formed very early, very shortly before the boy leaves the high school.  Just how it is formed I do not know, but I know one thing, that while I cannot tell anything about how successful a man will be intellectually in life from what he does in college, or, sometimes, I cannot tell very much about how large he will grow mentally, I know that boy will not rise very much higher morally than he stands in college when you send him there.  If, then, he has secured a moral training and influence, I firmly believe he will stay so.  If he does not come to us in that shape the probability is that he never will change for the good, but if he is filthy he will remain filthy still.  His character is made very largely in the high school.

How can you reach it?  I think you can reach it a good deal through literature.  I do not see how anybody can read Mr. Hawthorne or Mr. Emerson, and not long to be a gentleman, and feel as if he would like to be worthy to kiss the hem of the garment of those literary gentlemen.  You can read history.  You can make history a dreary chronicle.  You can learn of kings who never ought to have been born, and when they died, when they ought to have been dead fifty years before, and all the long list of battles fought which never ought to have been fought.  You can make it just such a weary chronicle.  You do not, nowadays, thank fortune; I have seen teachers that did.  Or you can make that history the Eleventh Chapter of Hebrews, and you can write your own Eleventh Chapter of Hebrews, if you will, for that chapter never was intended to be finished; and if you cannot add to it with your pioneer history of those who fought their way across the plains here fifty or more years ago, then you are teaching history to mighty little effect to this generation here in Utah.  The whole story is just this, if you can saturate your pupils with the character of just such men and women as that, then you have trained a generation of heroes and nobody can spoil them.