Live Issues in Classical Study (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1910 Excerpt: ... DRY BONES AND LIVING SPIRIT "What are you eating, my child?" said a lady to her little daughter, who came into the room visibly munching something. "Cheese," was the smiling answer. "Where did you get the cheese?" inquired her mother. "In the mousetrap," was the frank response. "Why what will those poor little mice say when they come and find all their nice cheese gone?" "There were two there just now, when I took it, and they did n't say a single word " There is no denying the fact that many people have studied the classics for a considerable length of time, and brought away from their study no more vital message than the child did from the dead mice. To such students the classics were merely dead, very dead, languages, --dead, with the dust of centuries heaped upon them. There was no word of life spoken by these musty and crumbling corpses, so far as their ears could detect. Yes, the classics were a veritable valley of dry bones, --bones of diphthongs and hidden quantities, bones of case endings and verbal inflections, bones of the tweedledum and tweedledee of absolute and relative temporal clauses, hideous great bones of indirect discourse, meaningless bones of ablative absolutes, monotonous bones of parasangs and what Caesar did, --all mingled with the bleaching bones of the hopeless victims of pedagogical severity, the victims that had perished at examination times in the vain attempt to classify these bones and assign them correctly to the prehistoric monstrosities to which they once belonged; and the idea that any breath of modern, up-to-date life could ever have been clothed upon this bone yard seemed as impossible as did the miracle foretold to the Hebrew prophet of old in answer to the query, "Can these dry bones live?" That a similar sentiment is q...