Author: Henry David Thoreau (81.198.70.---)
Date: 01-21-06 13:15
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XXII
My glass shall not persuade me I am old,
So long as youth and thou are of one date;
But when in thee time's furrows I behold,
Then look I death my days should expiate.
For all that beauty that doth cover thee,
Is but the seemly raiment of my heart,
Which in thy breast doth live, as thine in me:
How can I then be elder than thou art?
O! therefore love, be of thyself so wary
As I, not for myself, but for thee will;
Bearing thy heart, which I will keep so chary
As tender nurse her babe from faring ill.
Presume not on th;heart when mine is slain,
Thou gav'st me thine not to give back again.
--William Shakespeare
If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to get the police at the gates to keep order in the
inrushing multitude. See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving the natural method of teaching
what each wishes to learn, and insisting that you shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for. The college, which
should be a place of delightful labor, is made odious and unhealthy, and the young men are tempted to frivolous amusements
to rally their jaded spirits. I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by
awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the
attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and
it is an ungracious work to put on a professor. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
XXV
Let those who are in favour with their stars
Of public honour and proud titles boast,
Whilst I, whom fortune of such triumph bars
Unlook'd for joy in that I honour most.
Great princes' favourites their fair leaves spread
But as the marigold at the sun's eye,
And in themselves their pride lies buried,
For at a frown they in their glory die.
The painful warrior famoused for fight,
After a thousand victories once foil'd,
Is from the book of honour razed quite,
And all the rest forgot for which he toil'd:
Then happy I, that love and am belov'd,
Where I may not remove nor be remov'd.
--William Shakespeare
Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every
moment.
T. S. Eliot
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