And those old dreams of our ancestors in the childhood of England, they are fantastic enough, no doubt, and unreal, but yet they are most true and most practical, if we but use them as parables and symbols of human feeling and everlasting truth.  What, after all, is any event of earth, palpable as it may seem, but, like them, a shadow and a ghostly dream, till it has touched our hearts, till we have found out and obeyed its spiritual lesson?  Be sure that one really pure legend or ballad may bring God’s truth and heaven’s beauty more directly home to the young spirit than whole volumes of dry abstract didactic morality.  Outward things, beauty, action, nature, are the great problems for the young.  God has put them in a visible world, that by what they see they may learn to know the unseen; and we must begin to feed their minds with that literature which deals most with visible things, with passion manifested in action, which we shall find in the early writing of our Middle Ages; for then the collective mind of our nation was passing through its natural stages of childhood and budding youth, as every nation and every single individual must at some time or other do; a true “young England,” always significant and precious to the young.  I said there was a literary art before Shakespeare—­an art more simple, more childlike, more girlish as it were, and therefore all the more adapted for young minds.  But also an art most vigorous and pure in point of style:  thoroughly fitted to give its readers the first elements of taste, which must lie at the root of even the most complex aesthetics.  I know no higher specimens of poetic style, considering the subject, and the belief of the time about them, than may be found in many of our old ballads.  How many poets are there in England now, who could have written “The Twa Bairns,” or “Sir Patrick Spens?” How many such histories as old William of Malmesbury, in spite of all his foolish monk miracles?  As few now as there were then; and as for lying legends—­they had their superstitions, and we have ours; and the next generation will stare at our strange doings as much as we stare at our forefathers.  For our forefathers they were; we owe them filial reverence, thoughtful attention, and more—­we must know them ere we can know ourselves.  The only key to the present is the past.

But I must go farther still, and after premising that the English classics, so called, of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries will of course form the bulk of the lectures, I must plead for some instruction in the works of recent and living authors.  I cannot see why we are to teach the young about the past and not about the present.  After all, they have to live now, and at no other time; in this same nineteenth century lies their work:  it may be unfortunate, but we cannot help it.  I do not see why we should wish to help it.  I know no century which the world has yet seen so well worth