“Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life.”
Age should be the time of rich fruition. Not long since the Rev. William R. Alger, on his visit to Denver, after an absence of a dozen years, addressed a congregation of his old friends, and among other things he spoke of his impressions when he first approached these grand mountains. It was at set of sun, and, as he looked away over the plains, he beheld on an elevation a thousand cattle, and in the glory of the departing day they seemed to him like “golden cattle pasturing in the azure and feeding on the blue.” Upon his last visit he again approached these scenes at the close of day, and his impressions were as vivid as in earlier years; his enjoyment in life was deeper, his faith was stronger, and his hope brighter. There is no need to grow old in spirit; it is only the dead soul that wholly loses the hope and the joy of youth.
There are three grand categories, not always understood by those who carelessly name them—the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. May the thoughts and deeds which give character to life be such as to fall within this trinity of perfect ideals.
PLATO’S PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION AND LIFE.
It is the calm judgment of history that, in artistic, literary, and philosophical development, the world shows, relatively, nothing comparable to the Golden Age of Greece. Attica was the Shakespeare of the Ancient World. As the Bard of Avon gathered the material of legend, romance, and history, and crowned the intellectual activity of the Elizabethan Age with results of enduring value, so the leading city of Greece centred in herself many influences of the Orient, and, in a period of great intellectual awakening under favorable conditions, became the genius that produced results of surpassing power and beauty. The Greeks created when European civilization was young, and as yet there was little of the ideal that, in the Attic Period, blossomed into the conceptions of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.
In any other period never has so great a master as Socrates found so great a pupil as Plato; never has so great a master as Plato encountered so great a pupil as Aristotle. Each pupil grasped and enlarged upon the mighty work of his instructor.
The world still wonders how any age could become so suddenly and highly creative. Like the century plant, the Greek race seemed to have been accumulating, through a long period, power for a quick and startling development. The thoughtful historian enumerates many favoring conditions. The Greeks as a race were active, eager for knowledge, and had a capacity for healthy ideal conceptions. The beneficent climate brought them in contact with nature, and the peculiar charm of their sky, air, mountains, and sea filled them with a sense of wonder and a sense of beauty. We may also mention the stimulus of their intercourse with their own colonies and with other peoples; their religion, which contained the germs of ethical and philosophical thought, and was favorable to freedom of view; the respect for law that sought for the rules of the state and for individual conduct a foundation in permanent principles.
Socrates is a more favorite theme than Plato, partly because he is the first of the three heroic figures that mark the beginning of philosophy. Then his name is surrounded with a halo that was constituted by the events of Athens’ greatest period of fame. He lived just after the glory of victory over the Persian invaders had stimulated the Greek pride and every activity that is born of pride and hope. He lived in the period of Athenian supremacy and was contemporary with Phidias, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Pericles.