ith the lilies and the
skylarks. He does not precisely sing, of course; but then he looks so
unassuming in his open laudau! If all the world dined at one table, this
philosophy would meet with some rude knocks.

*****

Forgive me, if I seem to teach, who am as ignorant as the trees of the
mountain; but those who learn much do but skim the face of knowledge;
they seize the laws, they conceive the dignity of the design--the horror
of the living fact fades from the memory. It is we who sit at home with
evil who remember, I think, and are warned and pity.

*****

Look back now, for a moment, on your own brief experience of life; and
although you lived it feelingly in your own person, and had every step
of conduct burned in by pains and joys upon your memory, tell me what
definite lesson does experience hand on from youth to manhood, or from
both to age? The settled tenor which first strikes the eye is but
the shadow of a delusion. This is gone; that never truly was; and you
yourself are altered beyond recognition. Times and men and circumstances
change about your changing character, with a speed of which no earthly
hurricane affords an image. What was the best yesterday, is it still the
best in this changed theatre of a to-morrow? Will your own Past truly
guide you in your own violent and unexpected Future? And if this be
questionable, with what humble, with what hopeless eyes, should we not
watch other men driving beside us on their unknown careers, seeing with
unlike eyes, impelled by different gales, doing and suffering in another
sphere of things?

*****

The problem of education is twofold: first to know, and then to utter.
Every one who lives any semblance of an inner life thinks more nobly and
profoundly than he speaks; and the best teachers can impart only broken
images of the truth which they perceive. Speech which goes from one
to another between two natures, and, what is worse, between two
experiences, is doubly relative. The speaker buries his meaning; it is
for the hearer to dig it up again; and all speech, written or spoken, is
in a dead language until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.

*****

Culture is not measured by the greatness of the field which is covered
by our knowledge, but by the nicety with which we can perceive relations
in that field, whether great or small.

*****

We are accustomed nowadays to a great deal of puling over the
circumstances in which we are placed. The great r