onist can only approximate, even after he has
emerged from the prison-house and perfected his instrument through a
life of struggle. His highest moments of production are those of his
deepest inner listening--in which the trained mind-instrument is
quiescent and receptive, its will entirely given over to the greater
source within.

The forenoons with the little girl before the others came, showed me,
among many things, that education should be mainly a happy process. If I
find her getting too dreamy with the things she loves (that her
expression is becoming "wumbled," as Algernon Blackwood says), I
administer a bit of stiff reading for the pure purpose of straightening
out the brain. The best and dryest of the human solids is John Stuart
Mill. Weights, measures and intellectual balances are all honest in his
work--honest to madness. He is the perfect antidote for dreams. Burke's
ancient essay "On the Sublime" is hard reading, but has its rewards. You
will laugh at a child of ten or eleven reading these things. I once kept
the little girl for three days on the latter, and when I opened the
doors of her refrigerating plant, and gave her Thoreau's
"Walking"--there was something memorable in the liberation. She took to
Thoreau, as one held in after a week of storm emerges into full summer.
The release from any struggle leaves the mind with a new receptivity. It
was not that I wanted her to _get_ Mill or Burke, but that the mental
exercise which comes from grappling with these slaves of logic, or
masters, as you like, is a development of tissue, upon which the dreams,
playing forth again from within, find a fresh strength for expression.

Dreaming without action is a deadly dissipation. The mind of a child
becomes fogged and ineffective when the dreams are not brought forth.
Again, the dreams may be the brooding of a divine one, and yet if the
mind does not furnish the power for transmuting them into matter, they
are without value, and remain hid treasures. It is the same as faith
without works. While I hold the conviction that the brain itself is best
developed by the egress of the individual, rather than by any processes
from without, yet I would not keep the exterior senses closed.

In fact, just here is an important point of this whole study. In the
case of The Abbot it was the intellect which required development, even
to begin upon the expression of that within which was mainly
inarticulate, but mightily impressive,