“A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with rows on rows of natural objects, classified with name and form.  For what is the result of all these, except what we know as well without them, that the human figure preeminently and peculiarly is made in the image and likeness of God?”

“Individuals may be left to occupy themselves with whatever amuses them, with whatever gives them pleasure, whatever they think useful; but ’the proper study of mankind is man.’”

CHAPTER VIII

There are but few men who care to occupy themselves with the immediate past.  Either we are forcibly bound up in the present, or we lose ourselves in the long gone-by, and seek back for what is utterly lost, as if it were possible to summon it up again, and rehabilitate it.  Even in great and wealthy families who are under large obligations to their ancestors, we commonly find men thinking more of their grandfathers than their fathers.

Such reflections as these suggested themselves to our Assistant, as, on one of those beautiful days in which the departing winter is accustomed to imitate the spring, he had been walking up and down the great old castle garden, and admiring the tall avenues of the lindens, and the formal walks and flower-beds which had been laid out by Edward’s father.  The trees had thriven admirably, according to the design of him who had planted them, and now when they ought to have begun to be valued and enjoyed, no one ever spoke of them.  Hardly any one even went near them, and the interest and the outlay was now directed to the other side, out into the free and the open.

He remarked upon it to Charlotte on his return; she did not take it unkindly.  “While life is sweeping us forward,” she replied, “we fancy that we are acting out our own impulses; we believe that we choose ourselves what we will do, and what we will enjoy.  But in fact, if we look at it closely, our actions are no more than the plans and the desires of the time which we are compelled to carry out.”

“No doubt,” said the Assistant.  “And who is strong enough to withstand the stream of what is around him?  Time passes on, and in it, opinions, thoughts, prejudices, and interests.  If the youth of the son falls in the era of revolution, we may feel assured that he will have nothing in common with his father.  If the father lived at a time when the desire was to accumulate property, to secure the possession of it, to narrow and to gather one’s-self in, and to base one’s enjoyment in separation from the world, the son will at once seek to extend himself, to communicate himself to others, to spread himself over a wide surface, and open out his closed stores.”