"These inestimable advantages, which no modern skill can wholly
counterpoise, are known and felt by the scholar alone. He has not
failed, in the sweet and silent studies of his youth, to drink
deep at those sacred fountains of all that is just and beautiful
in human language.
"The thoughts and the words of the master-spirits of Greece and of
Rome, are inseparably blended in his memory; a sense of their
marvellous harmonies, their exquisite fitness, their consummate
polish, has sunk for ever in his heart, and thence throws out
light and fragrancy upon the gloom and the annoyance of his
maturer years. No avocations of professional labour will make him
abandon their wholesome study; in the midst of a thousand cares he
will find an hour to recur to his boyish lessons--to reperuse
them in the pleasurable consciousness of old associations, and in
the clearness of manly judgment, and to apply them to himself and
to the world with superior profit.
"The more extended his sphere of learning in the literature of
modern Europe, the more deeply, though the more wisely, will he
reverence that of classical antiquity; and in declining age, when
the appetite for magazines and reviews, and the ten-times repeated
trash of the day, has failed, he will retire, as it were, within a
circle of school-fellow friends, and end his secular studies as he
began them, with his Homer, his Horace, and his Shakespeare.
Pages:
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117