The uses of pictures in the study of literature are manifold. It is a long standing custom for teachers to familiarize their pupils with the portraits of the poets whose works they are taught to love. The benign countenance of Longfellow and the prophet-like head of Tennyson look down from many schoolroom walls. For nineteenth-century writers it is customary to use the accredited photographic portraits. For the celebrities of the older centuries we have many ideal heads. Raphael’s two great frescoes in the Hall of the Segnatura (Vatican) called Parnassus and the School of Athens, contain some fine figures of the poets and philosophers of antiquity: Homer, Dante, Virgil, and Ovid, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, etc. I always find high-school pupils greatly interested in these pictures, though I do not recall seeing them in any school hall or catalogue.[1] Two modern pictures giving vivid interest to the life story of the poets represented are Munkacsy’s Milton dictating Paradise Lost and Dicksee’s Swift and Stella.
A few illustrations of famous poems are specially adapted to schoolroom decoration, for the benefit of the literature classes. Such are: Hiawatha as a boy, by Elizabeth Norris; Walker’s four lunettes in the Congressional Library illustrating the Boy of Winander (Wordsworth’s Prelude), Adonis (Shelley), Endymion (Keats), and Comus (Milton); Landseer’s Twa Dogs, to illustrate Burns’s poem; Kaulbach’s
- ↑ Since this was written I have seen with great pleasure a beautiful Arundel print of the Parnassus in the Waltham (Mass.) High School.
