gested to him by parsing
his eyes over certain legible characters; shrinks from the fatigue of
thought, which, for want of practice, becomes insupportable to him; and
sits down contented with an endless, wearisome succession of words and
half-formed images, which fill the void of the mind, and continually
efface one another. Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common
sense; a substitute for true knowledge. Books are less often made use of
as 'spectacles' to look at nature with, than as blinds to keep out
its strong light and shifting scenery from weak eyes and indolent
dispositions. The book-worm wraps himself up in his web of verbal
generalities, and sees only the glimmering shadows of things reflected
from the minds of others. Nature _puts him out._ The impressions of real
objects, stripped of the disguises of words and voluminous roundabout
descriptions, are blows that stagger him; their variety distracts, their
rapidity exhausts him; and he turns from the bustle, the noise, and
glare, and whirling motion of the world about him (which he has not an
eye to follow in its fantastic changes, nor an understanding to reduce
to fixed principles), to the quiet monotony of the dead languages, and
the less startling and more intelligible combinations of the letters of
the alphabet. It is well, it is perfectly well. 'Leave me to my repose,'
is the motto of the sleeping and the dead. You might as well ask the
paralytic to leap from his chair and throw away his crutch, or, without
a miracle, to 'take up his bed and walk,' as expect the learned reader
to throw down his book and think for himself. He clings to it for his
intellectual support; and his dread of being left to himself is like the
horror of a vacuum. He can only breathe a learned atmosphere, as other
men breathe common air. He is a borrower of sense. He has no ideas of
his own, and must live on those of other people. The habit of supplying
our ideas from foreign sources 'enfeebles all internal strength of
thought,' as a course of dram-drinking destroys the tone of the stomach.
The faculties of the mind, when not exerted, or when cramped by custom
and authority, become listless, torpid, and unfit for the purposes of
thought or action. Can we wonder at the languor and lassitude which is
thus produced by a life of learned sloth and ignorance; by poring over
lines and syllables that excite little more idea or interest than if
they were the characters of an unknown t