Part 2 (1/2)
Fairer than waters where soft ht lies, Than flowers that slulad birds sing, Than a cool su through Beauty's deep blue eyes, Than laughing child, than orchards blosso, Than ruby lips that utter sweet replies,--
Fairer than these, than all that ht Of heaven on earthly things, as Night's young Queen Forth-looking froht Clothes the whole earth with her soft silvery sheen And ht
Nature is neither sad nor joyful We but see in her the reflection of our own loomy prospects have not the power to rob the happy of their contenthts, or may but remind us of all the hopes and joys we have lost; and autumn will speak to one of decay and death, to another of sleep and rest, after toil, to prepare for a new and brighter awakening All the glory of dawn and sunset is but etheric waves thrilling the vapory air and iician who sees and knoho thinks and loves ”It is the hts take shape and coloring froh which they pass; and a free and open mind looks upon the world in the mood in which a fair woman beholds herself in a mirror The world is his as much as the face is hers If we could live in the fairest spot of earth, and in the company of those who are dear, the source of our happiness would still be our own thought and love; and if they are great and noble, we cannot be miserable however meanly surrounded What is reality but a state of soul, finite in man, infinite in God? Theory underlies fact, and to the divine s are Godlike and beautiful The chemical elements are as sweet and pure in the buried corpse as in the bloo body of youth; and it is defective intellect, the warp of ignorance and sin, which hides from human eyes the perfect beauty of the world
”Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees, takes off his shoes”
What we all need is not so e, as a luminous and symmetrical s that are, not in isolation and abstraction, but in the living unity and harion is infinite, the value of conduct is paramount; but he who lacks intellectual culture, whatever else he ent The ish, and the divine iine that this life of the soul in the mind is easy; for it is only less difficult than the life of the soul in God To learn s; to master this or that science; to have skill in law or medicine; to acquaint one's self with the facts of history, with the opinions of philosophers or the teachings of theologians,--is comparatively not a difficult task; and there are hundreds who are learned, who are skillful, who are able, who have acuteness and depth and information, for one who has an open, free, and flexiblethe world of God and Nature attruth and beauty from many sides; which is serious, sober, and reasonable, but also fresh, gentle, and sympathetic; which enters with equal ease into the philosopher's thought, the poet's vision, and the ecstasy of the saint; which excludes no truth, is indifferent to no beauty, refuses hooodness
The ideal of culture indeed, like that of religion, like that of art, lies beyond our reach, since the truth and beauty which lure us on, and flee the farther the longer we pursue, are nothing less than the eternal and infinite God
And culture, if it is not to end in ion and art, with earnestness and reverence If the spirit in which ork is not deep and holy, we ain wisdoinner seeks to convert his belief into knowledge; but the trained thinker knows that knowledge ends in belief, since beyond our little islets of intellectual vision, lies the boundless, fathomless expanse of unknoorlds where faith and hope alone can be our guides Once individual nificant; but now the earth itself is become so,--a le like aniht suddenly gleaet a glihtness quickly dies, and only the surfaces of things rees when on the earth there was no living thing! then life's ugly, slis; then the conscious soul's fitful drea forth to endless tiht with its one star of hope twinkling before the all-hidden throne of God, in the shadohose too great light faith kneels and waits!
Why shall he whose lory, to frivolous boasting? Shall not life be e scorn for any being whothened and consoled the human heart? Shall he not perceive, more clearly than others, that the unseen Power by whoht and love, and that they alone bring help to ood, and are fountains of larger and hest mind, like the purest heart, is a witness of the soul and of God
CHAPTER IV
CULTURE AND THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE
But try, I urge,--the trying shall suffice: The aireat the life
BROWNING
The mass of ross ignorance; and even in civilized nations, where education is free, the multitude have but a rude acquaintance with the elee Their ability to read and write hardly serves intellectual andas they possess seems only to weaken their power to adht
If we turn to the htened countries are not great, we find but here and there an individual who has anything better than a sort of mechanical cleverness
Students, it has been said, on leaving college, quickly divide into two classes,--those who have learned nothing, and those who have forgotten everything In the professions, the lawyer tends to beco away from ideals The student of physical science is subdued to what he works in; the man of letters loses depth and earnestness; and the teacher, whose business it is to rouse and illumine souls, shrivels until he becomes merely a repeater of facts and doctrines in which there is no life, no power to exalt the iive tone to the intellect The teacher cannot create talent, and his best work lies in stiy and impulse; but this he seldo; and hence pupils very generally leave school as men quit a prison, with a sense of eet both the place and the kind of life there encouraged A talent is like seed-corn,--it bears within itself the power to break the confining walls and to spring upward to light, if only it be sown in proper soil, where the rain and the sunshi+ne fall; but this is a truth which those who make education a business are slow to accept They repress; they overawe; they are dictatorial; they prescribe rules and th and wisdoiven by their endowed in things which concern their highest gifts, lose heart, turn away from ideals, and abandon the pursuit of excellence The nobler the ly dealt with We seldo has helped to form opinion and to create literature, who, if he care to say what he feels, will not declare that his scholastic training was bad Milton, Gray, Dryden, Wordsworth, Byron, Cowley, Addison, Gibbon, Locke, Shelley, and Cowper had no love for the schools to which they were sent; Swift and Goldse honors; and Pope, Tho to do with institutions of learning A man educates himself; and the best work teachers can do, is to inspire the love offaith in the power of labor to develop faculty, and to open worlds of use and delight which are infinite, and which each individual must rediscover for himself It is the educator's business to cherish the aspirations of the young, to inspire them with confidence in themselves, and to reat or too long, if its result be cultivation and enlightenment of mind For them ideals are real; their life is as yet wrapped in the bud; and to encourage them to believe that if they are but true to themselves, the flower and the fruit will be fair and health-bringing, is to open for them the fountain of hope and noble endeavor
What men have done, men can still do Nay, shall we not rather believe that the best is yet to be done? The peoples e call ancient were but rude beginners We are the true ancients, the inheritors of all the wisdom and all the heroism of the past We stand in a wider world, andmore open ways Of the past we see but the sulory
Could we look upon the plains where thethe triple chain of servitude, ignorance, and want, we should understand how fair and beneficent our own age is Enthusiasm for the past cannot inspire the best intellectual work The heart turns to the past; but thethe cords which bind us to the things that pleased a childlike fancy To grow is to outgrow; and whatever of the past survives, survives, as the very word i and applicable here and now Let not the young believe that the age of the heroic and Godlike is gone Good and the ood are not harder to reconcile to-day than they were a hundred or a thousand years ago, and they who have a hearteven froe on which victory loves to smile If we are weak and inferior the fault lies in ourselves, not in the age We are the age; and if we but will and work, opportunities are offered us to becolorify a hus, like eternity, is ever present Let but the man stand forth, and he will find and do his work
We are too near our own age to discern its true glory, which shall best appear froround of another century; but surely we can feel that it throbs with life, with iive to all hts and purer loves
Society, the State, the Church, the individual, are striving with conscious purpose to ent We have become more humane than men have ever been, and acceptthe dooodness, and of truth
The ainorant, but to ry, but to do aith famine; not merely to visit the captive, but to eneration Already the chains of the slave have been broken, and the earth has become the home of God's free children