inning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing
was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum as of a distant
hive in May, which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They had
no idle thoughts and no one without could say their work, for their
industry was not in knots and excrescences embayed. Yet I find it
difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably even while I speak. It
is only after a long and serious effort to recollect that I became again
aware of their cohabitance. If it were not for such families as this I
think I should move out of Concord."

In the arts of music and painting and sculpture, one may find not only
professional satisfaction, but the strength that comes from higher
living and more lofty feeling. In the study of history as biography, the
acquaintance with the men and women of other times, those who have felt
and thought and acted and suffered to make a freer world for you and me,
like inspiration may be found. History is more than its incidents. It is
the movement of man. It is the movement of individual men, and it is in
giving illumination to personal and racial characters that the
succession of incidents has its value. The picturesque individual, the
man who could not be counted with the mass, the David, the Christ, the
Brutus, the Caesar, the Plato, the Alfred, the Charlemagne, the
Cromwell, the Mirabeau, the Luther, the Darwin, the Helmholtz, the
Goethe, the Franklin, the Hampden, the Lincoln, all these give
inspiration to history. It is well that we should know them, should know
them all, should know them well--an education is incomplete that is not
built about a Pantheon, dedicated to the worship of great men.

With all this comes that feeling of dedication to the highest purposes
which is the essential feature of religion. Religion should be known by
its tolerance, its broadmindedness, its faith in God and humanity, its
recognition of the duty of action.

And action should be understood in a large way, the taking of one's part
in affairs worth doing, not mere activity, nor fussiness, nor movement
for movement's sake, like that of "ants on whom pepper is sprinkled." As
the lesser enthusiasms fade and fail, one should take a stronger hold on
the higher ones. "Grizzling hair the brain doth clear" and one sees in
better perspective the things that need doing. It is thus possible to
grow old as a "grand old man," a phrase invented for Gladstone, but
which fits ju