•if: m }^j ,< ^j ^ i i B' ' ^ B: . ^ 1 1 » 'M Cts>' '«s' ;»'■' V5. i^,m}^ .<'^r/. mmr., m #M i'J-! *iff*7 V 'w! p :S O' jj) =£•>'/ \ oo't) C77 The date shows when this volume was taken. To renew this book copy the call No. aud give to th e librarian. HOME USE RULES. a 3 m A.: 1 All Books subject to Recall. Books not used for instruction or research are returnable within 4 weeks. Volutnes of periodi- cals and of pamphlets are held in the library as much as possible. For special purposes they are given out for a limited time. Borrowers should not use their library privileges for thebene- fit of other perrons. Books not needed during recess periods should be returned to the library, or arrange- nients made for their return during borrow- er's absence, if watited. Books needed by more than one person are held on the reserve list. Books of special value and gift books, when the giver wishes it, are not allowed to circulate. Readers are asked to report all cases of books marked or muti- lated. Do not deface books by marks and writing. 21003 C??"^" ""'""''">' '-'*'""'y ■-iterature for engineers— 3 1924 029 541 673 JTERATURE FOR ENGINEERS BY LANE COOPER Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029541673 LITERATURE FOR ENGINEERS AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE COLLEGES OF CIVIL AND MECHANICAL ENGINEERING BY LANE COOPER ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN CORNELL UNIVERSITY ■Jv^ PRINTED FOR THE AUTHOR ITHACA, NEW YORK 1909 H H 1.'^S°\'^<^ WEIMAR : PRINTED BY R. WAGNER SOHN LITERATURE FOR ENGINEERS Gentlemen : — My topic has been duly announced. You will listen to a few thoughts on the subject of literature for engineers. What sort of literature should an engineer — any one of you — take for his private reading? Next, how should he read it ? Thirdly — a question which must precede the other two, and whose answer will really contain an answer to them— why should he read at all? To address this audience upon this subject is a pleasure and a privilege. Upon the body of students throughout our country which this audience represents, depends to a considerable extent the tone of many of our larger institutions. At Cornell no other section of our campus is so populous as this ; and what is more, no other branch of our population consists so largely of picked men. That the life of the rest of us, that the life of the University as a whole, is pro- foundly influenced by your beliefs and aspirations may appeal to you as a conception in some measure novel. That the influence you exert upon the rest of us carries with it an obligation on your part will not, I hope, strike you as paradoxical ; for on the ground that you owe such obligation is based much of what I have to say to you. I do not ask you, for example, to read good literature because so-called academical students are supposed to read more than you ; but I ask you to read more because those academical students do not read enough. Not to deal in enigmas, I may say openly that my sincere opinion, founded. 4 Literature for Engineers if not on statistics, at all events on personal obser- vation, is this: you have in the Colleges of Engi- neering a larger proportion of men who really care for good literature, and would read it without the stimulus of formal instruction, than we have in the College of Arts and Sciences. At the same time it must be remembered that the best-read men are still to be found where we should expect them, clinging to the remains of the older classical training. In any case, we are not here for the arraignment of deficiencies, which, if they exist, are due to the general status of technical education throughout the country. But if, overtly or indirectly, we must mor- alize for a moment, let us at all events discuss no form of self-seeking, cultural or otherwise. Far be it from a teacher of literature, of the most social of all the arts, to say to any man : ' Go to ; read now this, that, and the other literary masterpiece — read Milton, read Shakespeare — simply for your own sake,' for the sake of what is called self-improvement. If true culture is essentially and inherently social, if it is inherently self-denying, sympathetic, we had better realize this essential and inherent nature of the thing at the outset. Herein, accordingly, we find the primary answer to the question why the engineer, or any other citizen, should read only what is good. He will read in order that he may be a good, helpful, efficient citizen, per- forming, and performing well, not only his special and technical, but also his general and humaner functions as a part of the body politic. Now the life of the state, like the life of every great fitting-school for the state, amounts to something more, I take it, than meat, or in the current parlance, bread and butter ; and amounts to more than the pulsating network of roads Literature for Engineers 5 and bridges that many of you will help to extend, by means of which during the next decade the food for ninety millions of Americans will be transported. The higher national life will not be wholly inde- pendent of food and raiment and the newer means of distribution, but it must be more than they. It will not be unsubstantial, unfounded, but it must be more than body or material. In this higher national life each individual has his right and share, which he can obtain only by communicating what is best in him to his fellows. Very briefly, then, the first reason why any one of us should busy himself with literature — I'with the best thoughts of the best men — is that he t.may react beneficially upon his neighbor. Have you not a natural impulse, when you find something good in a book, to read it aloud to your roommate? And the first application of this principle will involve the obligation mentioned above, namely, the obligation which our altruistic student of engineering, who would like to read Shakespeare for himself, owes to his benighted brother, the academic, who puts his trust in formal courses, and reads Shakespeare mainly as an imposed task. Courses in literature are good after I their fashion, very good for the man who is free, and i knows how to use them. Yet observe, I make no plea for the intrusion of non-technical courses upon a technical curriculum that is already full to bursting. After due consideration, I make bold to say that for the present no greater general blessing could befall (our professional schools than some arrangement 'whereby their students might be induced to employ .the proper amount of time in private, non-technical reading — the amount of time each day which every (well nourished mind should employ. Such an ar- Jrangement would not materially hurt the engineer, 6 Literature for Engineers and would go far, I believe, toward transforming the intellectual atmosphere of more than one university. Let us turn, however, to something more speciiic. The question why we should read or study Shake- speare or Milton is intimately connected with the question. What is the precise effect of good literature upon the individual who reads or hears it? What sensations, and what inner experiences, should you meet with when you read aloud the best poem of Tennyson or Kipling? Very rare is the individual, I imagine, who has even tried to define and localize the chilly creepings that are felt in the scalp and down the back of the neck, and on either side the spine, whenever the particular melody is heard which that particular soul likes best. Still fewer have paid attention to the effects, whether bodily or spiritual, that the reading of good poetry produces on the person who understands it. Yet it is just such matters of cause and effect that men of science are supposed to find interesting. When you have discovered that one thing causes or invariably precedes another, you assume that you know something about those things. When you observe that the application of heat to water generates steam, you have a form of knowledge that may prove beneficial. What, then, is generated by the proper application of a literary masterpiece to a human being who is prepared to receive it? By way of anticipation, let us reply : some kind of power. This question about the proper effect of literature belongs under a still more inclusive problem, namely, what is the effect, the proper effect, of the liberal arts in general? In other words, when we say that literature is the chief of the Uberal arts, what do we mean ? ' Liberal ' ? The word looks hke ' liberty '—is, in fact, connected with it by derivation; and liberty Literature for Engineers 7 means freedom. What have any of the arts to do with that? In what sense is Uterature a free art? In what sense or from what restraints does it enfran- chise or emancipate ? I will not engage you further with etymologies, yet I will say that the history of the term ' liberal arts ' does not preclude us from explaining the effect of the best literature somewhat as follows. The best literature, and ' by that is meant the best poetry, generates in us a power or pleasure that is not servile, a pleasure that only a free man can fully enjoy. The man that does not enjoy good poetry is not free ; and the man that is afraid of it is the slave of a timorous delusion, afraid of a power that he affects to despise. Unfortunately he belongs to a large class. Freedom being a relative term, we may say that the best literature' makes those who cultivate it more free than those who do not. But, free from what, and how? I must ask you to test what I now say by your own experience as soon as you can, and not once but many times, so that you may be sure of the details of your experiment, and sure of your results. Choose the best poem that you know ; to avoid mis- takes, choose the last act of Hamlet or Macbeth, or the last book of Paradise Lost, or the twenty-second book of Homer's Iliad in the translation by Lang, Leaf, and Myers. In any case make certain that your chosen passage is of the best, and that it is reason- ably long. Make certain that you understand it. When you know it well, read it aloud, with all the emphasis and feehng that you can muster. Then take a hand-glass and look at your eye. If you are quick enough, you may find the pupil dilating — just Hke a song-bird's, I fancy, when he sings, or a parrot's when he talks. We say that the song-bird is inspired. So he is. Both he and you are taking deeper, freer 8 Literature for Engineers breaths than when you ate your dinners. Your pulse, if you try it, is a little more rapid than usual, pos- sibly a little more regular. There is a feeling of harmony in your bodily frame. Your step is more elastic; your motions, as we say, are freer. If you happen already to be a fearless lover of the best literature, and if you make your test one of sufficient duration, you will also have certain inner experiences that are very powerful, though you may never before have observed them with accuracy. The sense of bodily well-being is paralleled by an inner elevation or exaltation of spirit. 'A few days ago,' said Bouchardon, a French sculptor of the eighteenth century — ' A few days ago, an old French book that I never heard of fell into my hands. It is called the Iliad of Homer. Since I read that book men are fifteen feet high to me, and I cannot sleep.' You are wide awake, bold for action. The apprehensions that but an hour since crowded upon you have dis- persed into nothingness. Your sympathy for jj^our fellow men asserts itself, but begins to lose itself im- mediately in anticipated efforts for their welfare. Were there an opportunity present for such effort, were an object of human pity before you, your emotion would be instantly transmuted into an unconscious act of charity. Your feelings are aroused. Your in- tellect is likewise quicker and more effective, begins grouping details under general heads, formulates plans, instantaneously sees the relation of means to ends. If you are well taught and wise, you will continue no longer in an idle conteniplation of your own mental states, nor luxuriate in the warmth of this bodily and inward enjoyment; you will attack one of those daily tasks that a little while ago seemed for- midable, but now seem moderate and feasible. And Literature for Engineers 9 you will finish it in one-half the time you had ex- pected. If you can convince a friend or two that successful, fearless — and I may add, reverent — activity is the final product of good poetry, properly read, you may regard the experiment as brilliantly Concluded. The specific effects of literature, and of the different forms of literature, no doubt, are various ; varying as the supple human spirit which literature tries to image. Yet on the basis of our experiment let us suppose that the most general and characteristic effects of the best literature are a sense of bodily well-being, and a less tangible, but no less real, sense of spiritual elevation or exaltation, not wholly diff'erent from the feeling produced in us by the best music ; a sense of freedom from fear, of unhampered ability to act, of pleasure in contemplating and performing our duties toward family and state. How, then, shall we know what is good, what will produce these effects, otherwise than by this experiment? For the experi- ment itself presupposes some one, a teacher or the like, to tell us what is good, in the first place. The dilemma after all is not so baffling. In the nutrition of our minds nature has not left us more helpless than in the care of our bodies. In general, you know, we run to the medical man in order to hear from the gray chin of wisdom what our own common sense has already suggested, and to fortify our own wills, shameful to say, by an appeal to the will of a stranger. Is the teacher of literature to be asked, then, what an engineer ought to read, and what he ought not? Has not the engineer's own common sense told him a hundred times what nutriment his better part should receive, and what stimulants it should forego ? Does n't he realize perfectly well that he may and ought to dine with Shakespeare, and not with the Sunday press ? 10 Literature for Engineers Is it not absolutely clear to everybody that in the choice of books one may and ought to be an opti- mist, shutting his eye against the bad? And what shall he do when he has read a few plays of Shake- speare? Read them again! Read them uritil the ex- periment described above begins to work. For it will work, just so surely as the engineer is a normal man and they are poems for all time. It cannot possibly help working, if only the experimenter will become so familiar with Macbeth and Hamlet^ Lear and Othello, that they continually ring in his ears, and rise to his lips when he tries to talk. Let him avoid all books that he is not sure about. This or that one may be very good ; but until the judgment of time, that is, the accumulated wisdom of many well trained critics, has grappled with it, he must be content to thrust it aside as doubtful. He is a student in a technical school, or he is a practising engineer. His spare mo- ments are few. He is not the type of man that likes to make mistakes. He is aware that he will not be making a mistake if he reads Homer or Dante in the best English translation, or Shakespeare, or the English Bible, or Milton. If during his leisure hours he will read them and little else for the next two years, and will eschew all popular magazines, he will never make another mistake about books; he will have what is known as taste. The acquisition of taste calls for a certain amount of self-denial ; nowadays taste is almost invariably acquired outside of school, if at all. But we assume that our professional student is possessed of initiative and of a vigorous will. This latter is an instrument almost indispensable in obtaining any thing that is worth while. You will remark that this list of authors is brief. You can hardly say that it is narrow. It is drawn in Literature for Engineers 11 accordance with an old Latin confession of literary faith — non multa, sed multum ; read, not many things, but much. If you want more extended counsel, and a longer list, go to Sir John Lubbock or Mr. Fred- eric Harrison, both of whom have written with intel- ligence and enthusiasm on the choice of books. Yet bear one thing in mind : any selection like Sir John Lubbock's of the ' hundred best books ' is bound to omit something that the next compiler would include, and may easily contain something injurious to the reader who accepts the list uncritically. It is much easier to mention five authors, a real acquaintance with whom would constitute a liberal education, than to mention fifty. And it would be no very hard matter to impress you with an array of great historical per- sonages who, like Lincoln, were men of few books. We hear of such cases more frequently than we hear of any who try to imitate them. Perhaps the imit^ ation does not seem sufficiently difficult. So much on why we read literature, and on what to redd. We read what gives us power and freedom, and we read it because it gives us power and freedom. If we cannot solve these questions offhand for our- selves, we have the judgment of the past to guide us. Now then, how shall we read ? First of all, read aloud. Every bit of literature properly so called that history has to show is intended, not for the eye primarily, but for the ear. Every line of Shakespeare, every line of Milton, is meant to be pronounced ; it cannot be duly appreciated until it is pronounced. Often an entire masterpiece remains dark and forbidding to you, simply because you have tried to interpret it with the eye alone. During the hour we have spoken several times of Milton. Doubtless many of you have never felt quite ready for Paradise Lost. No one who likes 12 Literature for Engineers orchestral music can long resist Milton, if only he learns how to reproduce the beat and swell and cadence of Milton out loud. In my experience as a teacher I can recall among my few and modest triumphs the cases of several students who thought themselves hopelessly blind to Paradise Lost, when their actual infirmity was nothing but an easily cured deafness. Unsealing their ears unlocked to them the doors of a Paradise whose melodies are not to be heard elsewhere in English verse. Very much of what we call prose is in the truest sense poetry, and loses half its significance if followed only with the eyes. Literary men, that is, men who write with imagination, are often ' ear- minded,' as we say. In the act of composition, they hear what they are about to write ; whereas other persons are more often ' eye-minded.' When you sit at your desk, pen in hand, y.ou very likely see your next sentence, or a part of it, in your mind's eye, a moment or two before you record the words on paper. The chief hindrance to your appreciation of the best literature may be that you have never been accustomed to hear the words that y6u see. But we must not be content with hearing them. When we read, we must, if necessary, smell and feel and taste them. In other words, reading means translating the visible signs on the printed page into terms of all the senses. Hence, if you ask, ' How shall I read Shakespeare ? ' the answer is, ' Read him with alert bodily senses.' When the Ghost in Hamlet says. But, soft; methinks I scent the morning's air, you must try to recall what the ozone at dawn smells like, since it is the earliest sign of day. If you do Literature for Engineers 13 translate the diction into terms of the several senses, the inner meaning of. Shakespeare will not often es- cape you. Making monotonous black characters on the page vividly stir the latent sense-perceptions is, however, a relatively slow and reluctant process. Few people have ever learned to do it consistently ; hence, it is fair to say, few people have ever truly learned to read. The moral of this is, read slowly. Take your time. Pause where the punctuation says pause ; wait a moment between a period and the next capital letter. And pause when common sense says pause, that is, when you have not understood. As the line of sentences comes filing before the window of your soul, scrutinize each individual expression with the animus, and more than the animus, that you would maintain if you were the paying-teller in a bank ; saying to yourself continually, ' Do I know this word ? ' and, 'What is this phrase worth?' Do n't confide in a sentence until you are assured of its credentials. Toward what they see in print many people, other- wise of sound reason, are strangely credulous, weakly cherishing an antique superstition which tells them, ' There's a divinity doth hedge about the printer's devil.' The linotype should long since have done away with all that romantic folly. Read aloud ; read slowly ; read suspiciously. Reread. What a busy man has time to read at all, he has time to read more than once. Was n't it Emerson who held that he could not aff"ord to own a book until it was ten years old — had at least to that extent proved its ability to survive ? And was n't it Schopen- hauer who considered no book worth while that was not worth a third perusal? If you read a thing but once, that is usually but so much lost time. The 14 Literature for Engineers best memory is weak. The most industrious student forgets a large part of what he tries to retain. The best-read man is the one who has oftenest read the best things; who goes through Homer, Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and the Bible, once a year. A veteran teacher of English, who has had a long and effective career in one of our eastern colleges, was approached by a student on some minor point in Hamlet. ' Do n't search me too deeply,' begged the teacher ; ' I have n't looked at Hamlet in six months.' When, therefore, you are offered, as the ultimate counsel on reading, the creed, non multa, sed multum, ' not many things, but much,' much signifies, in part, with great frequency. From this more general discussion of why, what, and how, let us pass to a cluster of definite and con- crete suggestions about reading, suitable to the needs and opportunities of men engaged in a non-literary profession. First. Select for your private property, so to speak, some one standard author, with whom you mean to keep company for ten years. Love him as the wolf loves the lamb— swallow him whole. Yet, on second thought, do n't bolt him. Gradually masticate all that he has written, and the best of what has been written about him. Try to pierce the secret of his life and activity. The proper study of mankind is biography. When you have found this secret, it will probably bear a resemblance to something within yourself, and that, too, no matter how gigantic your hero may look to you at first, or how remote his interests may seem from yours. The interests of all men and all ages are much the same, in kind if not in vigor. Accordingly, when you are casting about for him, do not be afraid of landing too big a fish. You may have the swiftest Literature for Engineers 15 and strongest in the ocean, almost for the asking. The big fellows are always swimming in clear view. There is that leviathan Shakespeare. You may draw him out with a hook — out of the book-market with a seventy-five cent silver hook; and you may play with him as with a bird. Hugest of beasts that swim, he is the most amiable and amusing of household pets. The most fortunate and enviable of householders are those who, having a fair portion of this world's goods and friends, have early in life caught a substantial author for a playmate. To know his ways does not require much time. Many a business man gives more time to his dog ; and the dog will live only a dozen years. Secondly. Have a few good books, of various sorts, not set on a shelf, but lying on your table where they can be easily opened. If you are, or think you are, an unusually hard-working man, have the table near your bed, and read a little each night before you go to sleep. This will probably be a strain on your eyes ; but eye-strain is preferable to mental starvation. Turn at least ten pages in some good book every day. That will allow you 3650 pages every year, which is about equivalent to Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and the Old Testament, in texts or versions easily ac- cessible. The better the book, the more valuable the twenty minutes you give to it. And let no one ob- ject that most good literature is hard or uninteresting, or wearying to a mind already tired. Such an ob- jection is a sure sign that the person who makes it is speaking without experience. He has not tried our experiment. He has second-rate books, or no books, or even bad books, on his table. Cultivate also the acquaintance of pocket editions. One of the best-read men at Cornell makes it his boast that he has never 16 Literature for Engineers had a course in English, and that he has done most of his reading on the train. Thirdly. Read in company. As we observed at the beginning, literature is a social art. In cultivating it we should set, and not follow, the fashion. Read with your roommate, and have a tender care for his taste. Above all, read out loud. Organize readings for Sunday afternoon or evening at your fraternity or club. The Greek-letter societies originally had some connection or other with the pursuit of literature. Their extraordinary growth in our great schools of technology and applied science is one of the curious developments in American education. Why not restore to them something of their lost function? It may be that they- have emigrated from their homes, where Greek was taught, to the very end of preserving the culture of the land. The technical student should look forward also to the time when he will again be in his home, and prepare himsdlf to read and listen there. At present, there is harsh criticism all over the country of the methods in vogue in the teaching of English. Do you know what it all amounts to ? It amounts to about this. We teachers of English are confronted by an almost insolvable problem. We are virtually asked to do by artificial stimulus in the classroom what ought to be done naturally in the home. In the university, we are expected to give men of eighteen or nineteen, let us say, a feeling for literature that is not usually acquired after the age of twelve. We can tell in an instant whether a freshman has been brought up in an atmosphere of good books, or comes from a house where they buy only the yellow journals and cheap magazines. In the latter case, he may appear to be well fed and well clothed, yet the first Literature for Ettgineers 17 word that he utters will betray his mental starvation. In warring against this sort of poverty and famine we can do something for our own generation, but we naturally have better hopes of the next. We can warn its parents. When a child asks for bread, no father will purposely give him a stone. Hence, fourthly. Begin now to accumulate a library, for fear that those that shall some day be dependent upon you may starve. It is not important that you own many books of general literature ; it is imperative that you own good books, and use them often. The best way to assure yourself that you really own a volume is to underscore sentences, and pencil the margin. For the sake of definiteness, I will venture to name a handful of books that every one ought to possess and wear out, adding a hint or two about useful editions: The Iliad of Homer, translated by Lang, Leaf, and Myers, and published by The Mac- millan Company : the Odyssey of Homer, translated by Butcher and Lang (the same publisher). The Odyssey is the best story of adventure ever put to- gether^ — The Divine Comedy of Dante, in any one of several translations ; let us say, in the pocket edition, three volumes, published by Dent. — The Oxford Shake- speare, published by the Oxford University Press. This is probably the best one-volume edition to rec- ommend. — -The Modern Reader's Bible, arranged by R. G. Moulton, recently issued in one volume, published by Macmillan. One reason why people fail to see that the Bible is the most interesting book in the world is that they are afraid of it ; but the student of liter- ature must not be put out of countenance by his own prejudices. Another reason is that it is usually cut up into verses. The Modern Reader's Bible, by attempting to restore the original paragraph or strophe, ordinarily 18 Literature for Engineers enables you to understand the connection, where you did not understand before. Throw away all precon- ceptions and second-hand opinions, and begin with the story of Job. — Lastly, the Oxford Milton^ published, like the Oxford, Shakespeare^ by the Oxford University Press. These six books will cost you in all, I think, about seven dollars. They may prove a safer equip- ment for a liberal education than the multitude of authors in the stacks of a university library. Fifthly. At the same time, one need not be afraid of large public collections, either. There is, indeed, some danger that the multiplication of free circulating libraries may discourage private ownership of books. Yet the danger will hardly frighten a person of sense from the door of knowledge, and will certainly never frighten away the man whose mind has been purged of fear by steady contact with Homer or Milton. Moreover, without access to larger collections than the average individual can afford, oiie can scarcely think of prosecuting any study, whether literary or technical. Therefore, for the sake of thoroughly knowing the author we have taken as our playmate, let us utilize some neighboring reading-room as a play- ground. It has been whispered that at several insti- tutions one or two of the students in engineering do not know what the inside of the university library is like. Sixthly. In connection with these remarks on the study of literature you will doubtless wish to hear a word on the practice of English composition. The two things are closely connected— cannot properly be separated. Formal composition, dissociated from the study of some definite subject, may accordingly be regarded as an offense against nature. To tell the truth, good writers themselves seem to put little trust Literature for Engineers 19 in composition as it is usually taught in school. Doubtless what young people need first of all is not exercise in the arrangement of their thoughts, but a supply of thoughts to be arranged. I have seen a few illiterates helped in the avoidance of gross errors by courses in daily themes. But, on the whole, such courses have made slight headway in this country against popular carelessness in the use of language ; so that those who fifteen years ago stood sponsors for the daily theme now confess that they have lost faith in it. Undoubtedly the man who absorbs some standard author entire, memorizing now and then as he reads, will do more for his style, both in richness and accuracy, than any course in writing can do for him. In corroboration, witness Mr. John Morley, himself a writer of distinction, and a scholar of rare sanity. ' I will even venture,' says this eminent statesman, ' to doubt the excellence and utility of the practice of over-much essay-writing and composition. I have very little faith in rules of style, though I have an unbounded faith in the virtue of cultivating direct and precise expression. But you must carry on the operation inside the mind, and not merely by practis- ing literary deportment on paper. . . . Right ex- pression is a part of character. As somebody has said, by learning to speak with precision, you learn to think with correctness ; and the way to firm and vigorous speech lies through the cultivation of high and noble sentiments. So far as my observation has gone, men will do better if they seek precision by studying carefully and with an open mind and a vig- ilant eye the great models of writing, than by ex- cessive practice of writing on their own account.' Much the same opinion is held by Mr. Frederic Harrison, who says of Oxford : 20 Literature for Engineers 'I look with sorrow on the habit which has grown up in the university since my day (in the far-off fifties) — the habit of making a considerable part of the education of the place to turn on the art of serving up gobbets of prepared information in essays more or less smooth and correct — more or less suc- cessful imitations of the viands that, are cooked for us daily in the press. I have heard that a student has been asked to write as many as seven essays in a week, a task which would exhaust the fertility of a Swift. ... It is the business of a university to train the mind to think and to impart solid knowl- edge, not to turn out nimble penmen who may earn a living as the clerks and salesmen of literature.' In closing, let us come back to one or two points that need final emphasis. First: good general reading makes a man work more freely and sanguinely and rapidly in his special vocation. This is not fancy, but solid fact. General reading is an act of recuper- ation. Most of an engineer's mental activity is in the nature of exercise. Your profession wears out the tissue of your mind. Good reading nourishes and builds up that tissue. There is frequent complaint among professional men that they have little or no time for books. The better men seem to have time. Some of them have time because they are better engineers ; more of them, one imagines, are better en- gineers because they take time to feed their minds. They have time for the essential things of life, be- cause their brains, being well fed, have tone, and work with fearless precision. If you as a man take time for good general reading, your general reading will gain time for you as an engineer. The proof of this pudding is in the eating. You have heard about the old ideal of education: a sound mind in a sound Literature for Engineers 21 body. Reconstructed to meet the conditions of the present day, this ideal should be stated thus : a spe- cifically trained mind, in a well nourished soul, in a healthy frame. Of such a man his country will not feel ashamed. You have heard occasional mention to-day of the word fear. From the Greeks down, the greatest poets and critics have been almost unanimous in recognizing that a primary function of the best literature is to release men from fear, to imbue them with an exalted and reverent courage. Thus, in the ideal Republic of Plato, Socrates would admit only such poetry as might after a positive fashion confirm the hearts of his ideal citizens, juid conduce directly to the development in them of reverence. Thus the real Greeks under Xenophon chanted a paean before entering into battle. Thus the Normans of William the Conqueror are said to have moved against the English at Hastings, a re- nowned minstrel in front singing their national epic, the Song of Roland. In peace, fear is the subtle and malign enemy of all original thought and action, of that personal in- dependence which every man must preserve if he is to be deemed free, and of that unqualified devotion to his country which patriotism at all times demands. Little as we may realize it, our atmosphere is sur- charged with an infectious terror, blighting our per- sonal happiness, thwarting our services to the com- monwealth. Considerj if you please, what is ordinarily the most potent of all incentives and deterrents with reference to individual action. Is it not an apprehen- sion of the opinion of others ? Men live so contin- uously in an atmosphere of anxiety, which is another name for fear, that they are not aware of their disease. They think, because it is common, that it is a state 22 Literature for Engineers of health. The anxiety to be like other people, only bigger and richer, is, like nearly all the forms of fear, unspeakably vulgar; more vulgar now than when Aristotle, master of those who know, observed that tragedy, especially in the hands of Sophocles, gave men pleasure by relieving them of certain painful and disturbing emotions, one of which was fear. The antidote to individual and communal fear may be had in a few volumes. Let me read fourteen lines from one of them. Here are the sentiments of a man eminently fearless, emi- nently reverent, a lofty being, endowed with every power of enjoyment which nature could bestow, or education develop ; who nevertheless gave the vigor of his manhood to relatively humble and most labo- rious service of his state ; who lost his eyesight in that labor; who, old, forsaken, blind, lived a suspect under a restored monarchy which he hated as a tyranny ; who yet retained his courage unabated, and preserved his faith in the efficacy of human endeavor. In sim- plicity, in reverence, in the power of inspiring courage, is there any thirig in our or any other modern language to equal Milton's sonnet On his Blindness? When I consider how my light is spent Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide, And that one talent which is death to hide Lodg'd with me useless, though my soul more bent To serve therewith my Maker, and present My true account, lest He returning chide — Doth God exact day-labor, light denied? I fondly ask. — But Patience, to prevent That murmur, soon replies : God doth not need Either man's work or His own gifts ; who best Literature for Engineers 23 Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best ; His state Is kingly; thousands "kt His bidding speed And post o'er land and ocean without rest ; — They also serve who only stand and wait. In our age of hurry we may accept this final senti- ment about two kinds of service as of some value, since it comes from one who, after all, infinitely exceeded the petty measure ofour accomplishment to-day. Milton is the man, and his are the civic virtues, that Words- worth longed for, with a longing equally applicable to our time and place in America : Milton ! thou shouldst be living at this hour : England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters : altar, sword, and pen. Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower. Have forfeited their ancient English dower Of inward happiness. We are selfish men; O ! raise us up, return to us again ; And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power. Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart; Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea : Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free. So didst thou travel on life's common way. In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart The lowliest duties on herself did lay.