"I won't take it as a prescription, Doctor!"
"A thorough course of mathematics would do more for one of your flighty mind, than anything else; you want chaining down to the severe logic of lines and angles."
"To the solution of such profound problems as, that the whole of a thing is more than a fraction of it; and things that are exactly alike resemble each other, for instance, eh?"
"Pshaw! you will make fun of everything. Will you ever reach discretion, and deal with things seriously?"
"I was never more serious in my life, and could cry with mortification over my lost, idled-away hours, you never believed in me, and are not to blame for that, nor have I any promises to make. I am not thought to be at all promising, I believe."
"Bart," said the Doctor, seriously, "you don't lack capacity; but you are too quick and impulsive, and all imagination and fancy."
"Well, Doctor, you flatter me; but really is not the imagination one of the highest elements of the human mind? In the wide world's history was it not a crowning, and one of the most useful qualities of many of the greatest men?"
"Great men have had imagination. I presume, and achieved great things in spite of it; but through it, never."
"Why, Doctor! the mere mathematician is the most servile of mortals. He is useful, but cannot create, or even discover. He weighs and measures. Project one of his angles into space, and, though it may reach within ten feet of a blazing star that dazzles men with eyes, yet he will neither see nor know of its existence. His foot-rule won't reach it, and he has no eyes. Imagination! it was the logic of the gods—the power to create; and among men it abolishes the impossible. By its force and strength one may strike fire from hidden flints in darkened worlds, and beat new windows in the blind sides of the ages. Columbus imagined another continent, and sailed to it; and so of all great discoverers."
The Doctor listened with some surprise. "Did it ever occur to you,
Bart, that you might be an orator of some sort?"