Thus she enters into the feeling of motherhood and so
shares the life of all the mothers whose children are her pupils. In
every page she reads she crosses anew the threshold of life and gains a
knowledge of its joys, its sorrows, its triumphs, or its defeats. In
short, she reads with the spirit and not merely with the mind, and thus
catches the spiritual meaning of what she reads. She can feel as well as
think and so can emotionalize the printed page. Nature has endowed her
with a sensory foundation that reacts to the emotional situations that
the author produces. Thus she understands, and that is the prime
desideratum in reading. And because she understands, she can interpret,
and cause her pupils to understand. Thus they receive another endowment
of life.
=Books as exponents of life.=--She has time for reading as she has time
for eating and drinking, and for the same reason. To her they are all
cooerdinate elements of life. She eats, and sleeps, and reads because she
is alive; and she is more alive because she eats, and sleeps, and reads.
She taps the sources of spiritual refreshment, without parade, and
rejoices in the consequent enrichment of her life. She does not smite
the rock, but speaks to it, and smiles upon it, and the waters gush
forth. She descends into Hades with Dante, and ascends Sinai with Moses,
and is refreshed and strengthened by her journeys. She sits enrapt as
Shakespeare turns the kaleidoscope of life for her, or stands enthralled
by Victor Hugo's picture of the human soul.
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