Let us suppose you play the piano.  There will be two kinds of lessons—­one will be for the fingers, one for the mind.  But really the mind also guides the finger-work; and the heart must be in all.  Your exercises will give you greater power to speak with the fingers.  Every new finger-exercise in piano-playing is like a new word in language.  Provided with it, you can say more than you could before.  The work for the mind is the classics.  These are compositions by the greater and lesser masters with which you form the taste, while the technical exercises are provided to give you the power, the ability, to play them.  Thus you see how well these two things go together.

Year after year, if you go on patiently, you will add to each of these tasks; more power will come to the fingers and to the mind.  All this time you will be coming nearer and nearer to the true music.  More and more will be coming out of your heart.  The spring will not only continue to bubble clearly but it will become more powerful.  Nothing is so wonderful as that.

Do you know what a sad thing it was for the man not to increase that one talent which had been given to him? [39] Perchance you have also one.  Then find it, love it, increase it.  Know that every step of the way, every bit of task, every moment of faith is paid for in later years ten thousandfold.

If now we remember our Talk on Listening it will serve us.  Did we not say then that the first duty of a listener is to the one who speaks for his good?  Lesson time is an opportunity above nearly all others when we should listen with love in our attention.  Yes, nothing less than that, because—­how many times we have heard it already—­putting love into anything, is putting the heart into it, and with less than that we do not get all we may have.

This Talk, then, is important, because it gathers together many things that have gone before, and hints at some to come.  Let us give the last words to speaking about that.  A lesson suggests listening; listening suggests the teacher, who with infinite kindness and severity guides us; and the teacher suggests the beautiful road along which we go and what we hear as we travel, that is the music of the heart; and the music of the heart has in it the tones about us, and the greater and lesser masters who thought them into beautiful forms.  The masters are as servants unto whom there is given to some one talent, to others two, and four, and more, but to each according to his worth, to be guided and employed in truth and honor; increased by each in accordance to his strength.

CHAPTER XI.

THE LIGHT ON THE PATH.

  “Let us seek service and be helpers of one another.”

“Master,” said the little child, “I am unhappy.  Though I have companions and games, they do not content me.  Even the music which I love above all the rest is not truly in my heart; nor is it the pleasure to me which it should be.  What am I to do?”