victory. I do not wish to stay with the nurse and hear fairy-tales. I submit to the School of Life. In the presence of the mysteries of pain and suffering, under the pressure of disaster and disease, I turn not for counsel to some Scythian soothsayer, but to a calm, wise teacher like Hippocrates, who says: "As for me I think that these maladies are divine like all others, but that none is more divine or more human than another. Each has its natural principle, and none exists without its natural cause."
The spirit which faces the facts is intellectual fortitude. And fortitude is the sentinel and guardian virtue; without it all the other virtues are in peril. Daring is inborn, and often born blind. But fortitude is implanted, nurtured, unfolded in the School of Life. I praise the marvellous courage of the human heart, enduring evils, facing perplexities, overcoming obstacles, rising after a hundred falls, building up what gravity pulls down, toiling at tasks never finished, relighting extinguished fires, and hoping all things. I find fault with Byron's line, "fair women and brave men,"—for women are not less brave than men, but often more, though in a different way. Life itself takes them in hand, these delicate and gracious creatures, and if they are worthy and willing, true scholars of experience, educates them in a heroism of the heart, which suffers all the more splendidly because it is sensitive, and conquers fear all the more gloriously because it is timorous.
The obstinacy of the materials with which we have to deal, in all kinds of human work, has an educational value. Some one has called it "the total depravity of inanimate things." The phrase would be final if depravity could be conceived as beneficent. No doubt a world in which matter never got out of place and became dirt; in which iron had no flaws and wood no cracks; in which gardens had no weeds and food grew ready cooked; in which clothes never wore out and washing was as easy as the advertisements describe it; in which the right word was not hard to find, and rules had no exceptions, and things never went wrong, would be a much easier world to live in. But for purposes of training and development it would be worth nothing at all. It is the resistance that puts us on our mettle: it is the conquest of the reluctant stuff that educates the worker. I wish you enough difficulties to keep you well and make you strong and skilful.
No one can get the full benefit of the School of Life who does not welcome the silent and deep instruction of Nature. This earth on which we live, these heavens above us, these dumb companions of our work and play, this wondrous living furniture and blossoming drapery of our school-room,—all have their lessons to impart. But they will not do their teaching swiftly and suddenly; they will not let us master their meaning in a single course, or sum it all up in a single treatise. Slowly, gradually, with infinite reserves, with delicate confidences, as if they would prolong the instruction that we may not forsake their companionship, they yield up their significance to the student who loves them.
The scientific study of nature is often commended on merely practical grounds. I would honor and praise it for higher reasons, for its power to train the senses in the habit of veracious observation, for its corrective influence upon the audacity of a logic which would attempt to evolve the camel from the inner consciousness of a philosopher, for its steadying, quieting effect upon the mind. Poets have indulged too often in supercilious sneers at the man of science, the natural philosopher. Thus Wordsworth calls him
"a fingering slave,—
One that would peep and botanize.
Upon his mother's grave."
The contempt is ill founded; the sneer is indiscriminate. It is as if one should speak of the poet as
A man of trifling breath,—
One that would flute and sonneteer
About his sweetheart's death.
Is there any more danger of narrowing the mind in the patient scrutiny of plants and birds than in the investigation of ancient documents and annals, or the study of tropes, metaphors, and metres? Is it only among men of science that we can find pettiness, and irascibility, and domineering omniscience; or do they
