From the opening essay from a book that excerpts heavily from Milton:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/44733/44733-0.txt:
The great function of literature, namely, to bring
into play the spiritual faculties, is very inadequately recognized, and
the study of English Literature is made too much an objective job—the
fault of teachers, not students. When the literature is studied as a
life-giving power, students are always more interested than when
everything else except the one thing needful receives attention,—the
sources of works of genius, the influences under which they were
produced, their relations to history and to time and place, and whatever
else may be made to engage the minds of students in the absence of the
teacher's ability to bring them into a sympathetic relationship with the
informing life of the works 'studied'—with that which constitutes their
absolute power.
