And so she went down into the valley and entered the great shadow, telling in cheerful, broken musings of a brother’s love.

And then she was carried to the churchyard at Edmonton.  There she rests in the grave with her brother.  In life they were never separated, and in death they are not divided.

JANE AUSTEN

Delaford is a nice place I can tell you; exactly what I call a nice, old-fashioned place, full of comforts, quite shut in with great garden-walls that are covered with fruit-trees, and such a mulberry-tree in the corner.  Then there is a dovecote, some delightful fish-ponds, and a very pretty canal, and everything, in short, that one could wish for; and moreover it’s close to the church and only a quarter of a mile from the turnpike road. —­Sense and Sensibility

[Illustration:  Jane Austen]

It was at Cambridge, England, I met him—­a fine, intelligent clergyman he was, too.

“He’s not a ’Varsity man,” said my new acquaintance, speaking of Doctor Joseph Parker, the world’s greatest preacher.  “If he were, he wouldn’t do all these preposterous things, you know.”

“He’s a little like Henry Irving,” I ventured apologetically.

“True, and what absurd mannerisms—­did you ever see the like!  Yes, one’s from Yorkshire and the other’s from Cornwall, and both are Philistines.”

He laughed at his little joke and so did I, for I always try to be polite.

So I went my way, and as I strolled it came to me that my clerical friend was right—­a university course might have taken all the individuality out of these strong men and made of their genius a purely neutral decoction.  And when I thought further and considered how much learning has done to banish wisdom, it was a satisfaction to remember that Shakespeare at Oxford did nothing beyond making the acquaintance of an inn-keeper’s wife.

It hardly seems possible that a Harvard degree would have made a stronger man of Abraham Lincoln; or that Edison, whose brain has wrought greater changes than that of any other man of the century, was the loser by not being versed in physics as taught at Yale.

The Law of Compensation never rests, and the men who are taught too much from books are not taught by Deity.  Most education in the past has failed to awaken in its subject a degree of intellectual consciousness.  It is the education that the Jesuits served out to the Indian.  It made him peaceable, but took all dignity out of him.  From a noble red man he descended into a dirty Injun, who signed away his heritage for rum.

The world’s plan of education has mostly been priestly—­we have striven to inculcate trust and reverence.  We have cited authorities and quoted precedents and given examples:  it was a matter of memory; while all the time the whole spiritual acreage was left untilled.