You might be interested to hear something about Thomas Arnold of Rugby, Tom Brown's teacher, or about Bronson Alcott who had such strange ways in discipline, requiring an offending pupil to punish him, holding out his own hand for the ferrule; or about Tagore in India who requires his boys to go out early in the morning to sit for half an hour under some bush or tree for quiet meditation. Talk about these men might perhaps appeal to your general interest in teachers and teaching, but what you crave this morning is different. You wish to repeat the experience of Achilles who slept beside the many-voiced sea, the Polu phloisboio Thalasses, and dreamed that his slain friend Patroclus came back to him:
"Like him in all things—stature, beautiful eyes
And voice and garments which he wore in life
A marvellous semblance of the living man."
Or the experience of Peter when his Master appeared to him and freshened the old love and admiration and moved him to carry on the Master's service in his own life.
You have set me a very difficult task but when I give you an inch you will take an ell. Where I stumble you will walk with sure step. If I am too much like Hamlet with old Polonius saying this cloud is like an elephant or a camel, you will see a cloud like that which went before the Israelites in the desert—a high spiritual presence to guide them.
A few days ago he was here. The memory is full of life. His stalwart figure clothed with gentlemanly care and taste, his bearing and movement so fine, so dignified, so courteous and so pleasant. His voice so special to him, with all harshness fined out of it, tuned as their voices are who have in their spirits the accent and habit of good will. And that fine face, the out-of-doors sign of good thinking and good feeling, practiced long and become a second nature. That shapely, well-proportioned, roomy head with its glory of white hair. He had, it seemed to me, in his physical presence the charm of old age without its weakness. He was not a sentimental, flowery man. He was naturally perhaps like the rock in the desert which Moses struck and drew water from it. The rock did not look as if it hid a fountain of living water, but he took duty to wife. He loved to do his duty. He could not be comfortable in any other course and doing his duty became his joy, his life. Wherever you found him, in school, in church, in the state, in the Grand Army, he was at his post, on guard, awake, alert, devoted. He did not go with the crowd into the Civil War. He thought alone and deeply. He weighed the matter by himself. He compared his obligation to his father on the old farm with the call of the Union and concluded that he ought to go. After a long life of fidelity to obligation he could not breathe easily in any other atmosphere. He went simply and straight to his post with his whole gift and might. Duty—
"Stern lawgiver! Yet thou dost wear
The Godhead's most benignant grace;
Nor know we anything so fair