It is my fervent belief that
to take classes of young men and to preach them the gospel according-to-Poetry
is to fill the most serious gap in our system of higher education;
I think one can already perceive a certain narrowing of sympathy
and -- what is even worse -- an unsymmetric development of faculty,
both intellectual and moral, from a too exclusive devotion to Science
which Science itself would be the first to condemn.
--
* `Midsummer Night's Dream', `Hamlet', and `The Tempest'.
--
As to the first six class lectures on "The Physics and Metaphysics of Poetry":
they unfold my system of English Prosody, in which I should
thoroughly drill every student until he should be able to note down,
in musical signs, the rhythm of any English poem. This drilling
would continue through the whole course, inasmuch as I regard
a mastery of the principles set forth in those lectures as vitally important
to all systematic progress in the understanding and enjoyment of poetry.
I should have added, apropos of this class course, that there ought to be
one examination each week, to every two lectures.
In the first interview we had, after my appointment, it was your intention
to place this study among those required by the University for a degree.
I hope sincerely you have not abandoned this idea; and the course
outlined in "Class lectures" forwarded to you the other day,
and in the theses of which I send the first seven herewith,
seems to me the best to begin with.
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