=Redemption of common from commonplace.=—­She has the supreme gift of being able to redeem the common from the plane of the commonplace.  Indeed, she never permits any fact of the books to become commonplace to her pupils.  They all know that Columbus discovered America in 1492, but when the recitation touches this fact she invests it with life and meaning and so makes it glow as a factor in the class exercise.  The humdrum traditional teacher asks the question; and when the pupil drones forth the answer, “Columbus discovered America in 1492,” she dismisses the whole matter with the phonographic response, “Very good.”  What a farce!  What a travesty upon the work of the teacher!  Instead of being very good, it is bad, yea, inexpressibly bad.  The artist teacher does it far better.  By the magic of her touch she causes the imagination of her pupils to be fired and their interest to thrill with the mighty significance of the great event.  They feel, vicariously, the poverty of Columbus in his appeals for aid and wish they might have been there to assist.  They find themselves standing beside the intrepid mariner, watching the angry waves striving to beat him back.  They watch him peering into space, day after day, and feel a thousand pities for him in his suspense.  And when he steps out upon the new land, they want to shout out their salvos and proclaim him a victor.

=The voyage of Columbus.=—­They have yearned, and striven, and prayed with Columbus, and so have lived all the events of his great achievements.  Hence, it can never be commonplace in their thinking.  The teacher lifted it far away from that plane and made it loom high and large in their consciousness.  A dramatic critic avers that the action of the play occurs, not upon the stage, but in the imagination of the auditors; that the players merely cause the imagination to produce the action; and that if nothing were occurring in the imagination of the people in the seats beyond what is occurring on the stage, the audience would leave the theater by way of protest.  The artist teacher acts upon this very principle in every class exercise.  Neither the teacher nor the book can possibly depict even a moiety of all that she hopes to produce in the imagination of the pupils.  She is ever striving to find the one word or sentence that will evoke a whole train of events in their minds.  Just here is where her superb art is shown.  A whole volume could not portray all that the imagination of the pupils saw in connection with the voyage of Columbus, and yet the teacher caused all these things to happen by the use of comparatively few words.  This is high art; this proclaims the artist teacher.