The mind now thinks, now acts, and each fit reproduces the other.  When the artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy no longer paints, when thoughts are no longer apprehended and books are a weariness,—­he has always the resource to live.  Character is higher than intellect.  Thinking is the function.  Living is the functionary.  The stream retreats to its source.  A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think.  Does he lack organ or medium to impart his truth?  He can still fall back on this elemental force of living them.  This is a total act.  Thinking is a partial act.  Let the grandeur of justice shine in his affairs.  Let the beauty of affection cheer his lowly roof.  Those “far from fame,” who dwell and act with him, will feel the force of his constitution in the doings and passages of the day better than it can be measured by any public and designed display.  Time shall teach him that the scholar loses no hour which the man lives.  Herein he unfolds the sacred germ of his instinct, screened from influence.  What is lost in seemliness is gained in strength.  Not out of those on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled[54] savage nature; out of terrible Druids[55] and Berserkers[56] come at last Alfred[57] and Shakespeare.  I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen.  There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade,[58] for learned as well as for unlearned hands.  And labor is everywhere welcome; always we are invited to work; only be this limitation observed, that a man shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments and modes of action.

* * * * *

I have now spoken of the education of the scholar by nature, by books, and by action.  It remains to say somewhat of his duties.

They are such as become Man Thinking.  They may all be comprised in self-trust.  The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.  He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation.  Flamsteed[59] and Herschel,[60] in their glazed observatories, may catalogue the stars with the praise of all men, and, the results being splendid and useful, honor is sure.  But he, in his private observatory, cataloguing obscure and nebulous[61] stars of the human mind, which as yet no man has thought of as such,—­watching days and months sometimes for a few facts; correcting still his old records,—­must relinquish display and immediate fame.  In the long period of his preparation he must betray often an ignorance and shiftlessness in popular arts, incurring the disdain of the able who shoulder him aside.  Long he must stammer in his speech; often forego the living for the dead.  Worse yet, he must accept—­how often!—­poverty and solitude.  For the