I know well the common censure by which objections to such futilities of so-called education are met, by the men who have been ruined by them,—the common plea that anything does to "exercise the mind upon." It is an utterly false one. The human soul, in youth, is not a machine of which you can polish the cogs with any kelp or brickdust near at hand; and, having got it into working order, and good, empty, and oiled serviceableness, start your immortal locomotive at twenty-five years old or thirty, express from the Strait Gate, on the Narrow Road. The whole period of youth is one essentially of formation, edification, instruction, I use the words with their weight in them; intaking of stores, establishment in vital habits, hopes and faiths. There is not an hour of it but is trembling with destinies,—not a moment of which, once past, the appointed work can ever be done again, or the neglected blow struck on the cold iron. Take your vase of Venice glass out of the furnace, and strew chaff over it in its transparent heat, and recover that to its clearness and rubied glory when the north wind has blown upon it; but do not think to strew chaff over the child fresh from God's presence, and to bring the heavenly colors back to him—at least in this world.
[120] Compare Stones of Venice, vol. iii. chap. iii. § 74.
[121] Taken all in all, the works of Cruikshank have the most sterling value of any belonging to this class, produced in England.
[122] "The notice in Blackwood is still more scurrilous; the circumstance of Keats having been brought up a surgeon is the staple of the jokes of the piece. He is told 'it is a better and wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet.'"—Milnes' Life of Keats, vol. i. p. 200, and compare pp. 193, 194. It may perhaps be said that I attach too much importance to the evil of base criticism; but those who think so have never rightly understood its scope, nor the reach of that stern saying of Johnson's (Idler, No. 3, April 29, 1758): "Little does he (who assumes the character of a critic) think how many harmless men he involves in his own guilt, by teaching them to be noxious without malignity, and to repeat objections which they do not understand." And truly, not in this kind only, but in all things whatsoever, there is not, to my mind, a more woful or wonderful matter of thought than the power of a fool. In the world's affairs there is no design so great or good but it will take twenty wise men to help it forward a few inches, and a single fool can stop it; there is no evil so great or so terrible but that, after a multitude of counsellors have taken means to avert it, a single fool will bring it down. Pestilence, famine, and the sword, are given into the fool's hand as the arrows into the hand of the giant: and if he were fairly set forth in the right motley, the web of it should be sackcloth and sable; the bells on his cap, passing balls; his badge, a bear robbed of her whelps; and his bauble, a sexton's spade.
[123] By the way, this doubt of the possibility of an emperor's death till he proves it, is a curious fact in the history of Scottish metaphysics in the nineteenth century.
[124] The following extract from my diary refers to the only instance in which I remember any appearance of a spring, or welling of water through inner fissures, in the aiguilles.
"20th August. Ascended the moraine till I reached the base of Blaitière; the upper part of the moraine excessively loose and edgy; covered with fresh snow: the rocks were wreathed in mist, and a light sleet, composed of small grains of kneaded snow, kept beating in my face; it was bitter cold too, though the thermometer was at 43°, but the wind was like that of an English December thaw. I got to the base of the aiguille, however, one of the most grand and sweeping bits of granite I have ever seen; a small gurgling streamlet, escaping from a fissure not wide enough to let in my hand, made a strange hollow ringing in the compact rock, and came welling out over its ledges with the sound, and successive wave, of water out of a narrow-necked bottle, covering the rock with ice (which must have been frozen there last night) two inches thick. I levelled the Breven top, and found it a little beneath me; the Charmoz glacier on the left, sank from the moraine in broken fragments of nevè, and swept back under the dark walls of the Charmoz, lost in cloud."
[125] If these two unlucky words get much more hold in the language, we shall soon have our philosophers refusing to call their dinner "dinner," but speaking of it always as their "objective appetite."
END OF THE FOURTH VOLUME.