their makers.

Thomas Carlyle, a Scotch author of this century, spoke very truly when
he said:

"Great men are profitable company; we cannot look upon a great man
without gaining something by him."[22]

CHAPTER VII.

WHAT WE SEE AND HEAR.

"You must feel the mountains above you while you work upon your
little garden."--_Phillips Brooks._[23]

Somewhere else we shall have some definite lessons in music-thinking.
Let us then devote this Talk to finding out what is suggested to us by
the things we see and hear.

Once a boy wrote down little songs. When the people asked him how he
could do it, he replied by saying that he made his songs from thoughts
which most other people let slip. We have already talked about thought
and about learning to express it. If a person of pure thought will
only store it up and become able to express it properly, when the time
comes he can make little songs or many other things; for all things
are made of thought. The poem is stored-up thought expressed in words;
the great cathedral like the one at Winchester, in England, or the one
near the Rhine, at Cologne, in Germany, is stored-up thought expressed
in stone. So with the picture and the statue: they are stored-up
thought on canvas and in marble.[24] In short, we learn by looking at
great things just what the little ones are; and we know from poems and
buildings and the like, that these, and even commoner things, like a
well-kept garden, a tidy room, a carefully learned lesson, even a
smile on one's face result, every one of them, from stored-up thought.

We can consequently make a definition of THINGS by saying they are
what is thought. Things are made of thought. Even if you cannot
understand this fully now, keep it by you and as you grow older its
truth will be more and more clear. It will be luminous. Luminous is
just the word, for it comes from a word in another language and means
_light_. Now the better you understand things the more _light_ you
have about them. And out of this you can understand how well ignorance
has been compared with darkness. Hence, from the poem, the building,
the painting, the statue, and from commoner things we can learn, as it
was said in a previous Talk, that music is stored-up thought told in
beautiful tones.

Now let us heed the valuable part of all this. If poems, statues, and
all other beautiful things are made out of stored-up thought (and
commoner things are, too), we ought to be