She will be delighted to learn
that no machine was ever constructed without the aid of the
multiplication table, and when she is teaching this table thereafter she
does the work with keener zest, knowing that it may function in another
machine.
=Art.=--When she looks at the "Captive Andromache" by Leighton she is
involved in a network of speculations. She wonders by what devious ways
the mind of the artist had traveled in reaching this type and example of
behavior. She wonders whether the artistic impulse was born in him or
whether it was acquired. She sees that he knew his Homer and she would
be glad to know just how his reading of the "Iliad" had come to function
in this particular picture. She further wonders what lessons in drawing
and painting the artist had had in the schools that finally culminated
in this masterpiece, and whether any of his classmates ever achieved
distinction as artists. She wonders, too, whether there is an embryo
artist in her class and what she ought to do in the face of that
possibility. Again she wonders how geography, grammar, and spelling can
be made to function in such a painting as Rosa Bonheur's "The Plough
Oxen," and her wonder serves to invest these subjects with new meaning
and power.
=Shakespeare.=--In the school at Stratford they pointed out to her the
desk at which Shakespeare sat as a lad, with all its boyish
hieroglyphics, and her thought instinctively leaped across the years to
"The Tempest," "King Lear," and "Hamlet.
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