tunates who
dwell in the tropics, where bread grows on trees and clothing is
unnecessary, who have reserved seats in this world.

To the majority of men I fancy that literature is very much the same that
history is; and history is presented as a museum of antiquities and
curiosities, classified, arranged, and labeled. One may walk through it
as he does through the Hotel de Cluny; he feels that he ought to be
interested in it, but it is very tiresome. Learning is regarded in like
manner as an accumulation of literature, gathered into great storehouses
called libraries--the thought of which excites great respect in most
minds, but is ineffably tedious. Year after year and age after age it
accumulates--this evidence and monument of intellectual activity--piling
itself up in vast collections, which it needs a lifetime even to
catalogue, and through which the uncultured walk as the idle do through
the British Museum, with no very strong indignation against Omar who
burned the library at Alexandria.

To the popular mind this vast accumulation of learning in libraries, or
in brains that do not visibly apply it, is much the same thing. The
business of the scholar appears to be this sort of accumulation; and the
young student, who comes to the world with a little portion of this
treasure dug out of some classic tomb or mediaeval museum, is received
with little more enthusiasm than is the miraculous handkerchief of St.
Veronica by the crowd of Protestants to whom it is exhibited on Holy Week
in St. Peter's. The historian must make his museum live again; the
scholar must vivify his learning with a present purpose.

It is unnecessary for me to say that all this is only from the
unsympathetic and worldly side. I should think myself a criminal if I
said anything to chill the enthusiasm of the young scholar, or to dash
with any skepticism his longing and his hope. He has chosen the highest.
His beautiful faith and his aspiration are the light of life. Without his
fresh enthusiasm and his gallant devotion to learning, to art, to
culture, the world would be dreary enough. Through him comes the
ever-springing inspiration in affairs. Baffled at every turn and driven
defeated from a hundred fields, he carries victory in himself. He belongs
to a great and immortal army. Let him not be discouraged at his apparent
little influence, even though every sally of every young life may seem
like a forlorn hope. No man can see the whole of the batt