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.
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