Our shelves bend and crack under the load of unwise
and learned authorship. There are two stages in every student's life.
In the first he is afraid of books; in the second books are afraid
of him. For they are a great community of thieves, and one finds the
same stolen patterns in all their pockets. Though often dressed in
sheep's clothing, they have the maw of wolves. When the student has
once found them out, he laughs at the pretensions of erudition, and
strides gayly up and down great libraries, feeling that the most
blustering folio of them all will turn as pale as if it were bound
in law-calf, if he only lay his hand on its shoulder.
Nor, lastly, can any elevation of aim, any thirst for the divine
springs of knowledge, enable a man to dispense with the sober habits
of observation and the positive acquirements that must give him the
stamina to attempt the higher flights of thought. The eagle's wings
are nothing without his pectoral muscles. It is not Swedenborg and
his disciples that legislate for the scientific world; they may
suggest truth, but they rarely prove it, and never bring it into
such systematic forms as narrow-minded Nature will insist on laying
down.
That all these qualities which go to make up our ideal should exist
in absolute perfection in any single man of mortal birth is not to
be expected.
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