The High Seas are Theirs.
They shall command you, overwhelm you. Book-lubbers, paper-plodders, shall be as though they were not. The youth of the earth shall be renewed in the morning, the suns and the stars shall be unlocked, and the evening shall go forth with joy. The mountains shall be freed from the pick and the shovel and the book, and lift themselves to heaven. Flowers shall again outblossom botanies, and gymnasts of music shall be laid low, and Birds Through An Opera Glass shall sing. Joy shall come to knowledge, and the strength of Joy upon it. They are Coming, O Ye Shades of Learning, a thousand thousand strong. Their sails flock the Sea. The smoke and the throb of their engines is the promise of the east. The days of thirteen-thousand-ton, three-horse-power education are numbered.
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A Note
It is one of the danger signs of the times that the men who have most closely observed our modern life, in its social, industrial, artistic, educational, and religious aspects seem to be gradually coming to the point where they all but take it for granted in considering all social, industrial, and educational and political questions, that the conditions of modern times are such, and are going to be such that imagination and personality might as well be dropped as practical forces—forces that must be reckoned with in the movement of human life. Nearly all the old-time outlooks of the Soul, as they stand in history, have been taken for factory sites, bought up by syndicates, moral and otherwise, and are being used for chimneys. Nothing but smoke and steel and wooden Things come out of them. Poets and brokers are both telling us on every hand that imagination is impossible and personality incredible in modern life.
Imagination and personality are the spirit and the dust out of which all great nations and all great religions are made.
The attempt has been made in the foregoing pages to point out that they are not dead. The Altar smoulders.
In pointing out how imagination and personality can be wrought into one single branch of a man’s education—his relation to books—principles may have been suggested which can be concretely applied by all of us, each in our own department, to the education of the whole man.
