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President Porter, of Yale says that "the rush and hurry of our modern activity needs the infusion of a calmer spirit and of steadier thoughts. Its rash and eager generalizations and its exaggerated statements need strong and steady thinkers who were trained in the school of severe definitions and sharp conceptions and steady and clear-eyed good sense. The extravagant oratory, the sensational declamation, the encumbered poetry, the transcendental philosophy, the romantic fiction, the agnostic atheism, the pessimistic dilettanteism, to which modern speculation, and modern science and modern poetry tend, need now and then a "season of calm weather," such as a dialogue of Plato, an oration of Demosthenes, a tragedy of Sophocles, or a book of Homer, or at least a letter of Cicero, an ode of Horace, or a book of Virgil to quiet the fevered spirit."
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