“Our birth is but a deep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home!”

To write, the soul chooses, and God stands ever by to help.  That is why great work always impresses us as inspired.  God did it.  It is God who whispers the deathless thought and phrase:  the subtler collocations are divine.

Take the word star.  To the child it means a bright point that glitters and twinkles in the sky, and sets him saying an old nursery rhyme.  To the youth or maiden it suggests love, romance, a summer eve, or a frosty walk under the friendly winter sky.  To the rhetorician it suggests a figure of speech—­the star of hope.  To the mariner it suggests guidance and the homeward port.  To the astronomer it means the world in which he lives.  His life is centred in that star.  To the poet it means all these things and many more.  For the poet is the one who, in his own heart, holds all the meanings that words hold for the race.  Read again the lines just quoted, and think of Wordsworth’s outlook on the star!

The dictionary definition of a word can seldom be the real one, nor does it reveal the deeper sense it has.  It blazes a path for the understanding, but individual thought must follow.  Take the words time, friendship, work, play, heroism.  It took Carlyle to define Time for us.  Emerson has defined Friendship.  Let the lights and shadows of the thought of Carlyle and Emerson play upon these words, they are at once removed from mechanical definition, and we dimly perceive that each word is larger than the outreach of the thought of man.  Another generation than ours shall define and refine them.  In heaven, in some other aeon, we shall find out what they really mean!

Thus knowledge is not permanent.  It reels.  It proceeds, it changes, it is iridescent with new significance from day to day.

What is true of a word, and what we make of it, is true of every phase of learning.  The black-board is not all.  Learning is not tied to it, or to any one person, demonstration, interpretation, event, or epoch.  No wise man can keep his learning to himself, and yet he cannot, though he teach a thousand years, transmit his deeper learning to another.  The atmosphere, the casual information, the spiritual magnetism of a great man, will teach better than the text-books, the lecture courses, and the formal resources of academic halls.  Thus Mark Hopkins is in himself a university, given a boy on the other end of the log on which he sits.