power to exalt the imagination
or to give tone to the intellect. The teacher cannot create talent, and
his best work lies in stimulating and directing energy and impulse; but
this he seldom strives to do or to make himself capable of doing; and
hence pupils very generally leave school as men quit a prison, with a
sense of emancipation, and with a desire to forget both the place and
the kind of life there encouraged. A talent is like seed-corn,--it bears
within itself the power to break the confining walls and to spring
upward to light, if only it be sown in proper soil, where the rain and
the sunshine fall; but this is a truth which those who make education a
business are slow to accept. They repress; they overawe; they are
dictatorial; they prescribe rules and methods for minds which can gain
strength and wisdom only by following the bent given by their
endowments,--and thus the young, who are most easily discouraged in
things which concern their highest gifts, lose heart, turn away from
ideals, and abandon the pursuit of excellence. The nobler the mind, the
greater the danger of its being wrongly dealt with. We seldom find a man
whose thinking has helped to form opinion and to create literature, who,
if he care to say what he feels, will not declare that his scholastic
training was bad. Milton, Gray, Dryden, Wordsworth, Byron, Cowley,
Addison, Gibbon, Locke, Shelley, and Cowper had no love for the schools
to which they were sent; Swift and Goldsmith received no college honors;
and Pope, Thomson, Burns, and Shakespeare had little or nothing to do
with institutions of learning. A man educates himself; and the best work
teachers can do, is to inspire the love of mental exercise and a living
faith in the power of labor to develop faculty, and to open worlds of
use and delight which are infinite, and which each individual must
rediscover for himself. It is the educator's business to cherish the
aspirations of the young, to inspire them with confidence in themselves,
and to make them feel and understand that no labor can be too great or
too long, if its result be cultivation and enlightenment of mind. For
them ideals are real; their life is as yet wrapped in the bud; and to
encourage them to believe that if they are but true to themselves, the
flower and the fruit will be fair and health-bringing, is to open for
them the fountain of hope and noble endeavor.

What men have done, men can still do. Nay, shall we not rather beli