A wise youth will think twice before embarking upon a career involving large wealth. Some there are possessed of vast property whose duty it is to carry bravely their heavy burden in the interest of society and the increase of life's comforts, conveniences and happiness. Yet wise Agur's prayer still holds: "Give me neither poverty nor riches." Whittier, on his little farm, refusing a princely sum for a lecture, was content with small means. Wendell Phillips, preferring the slave and the contempt of Boston's merchants and her patrician society, chose to "be worthy, not respectable." Some Ruskin, distributing his bonds and stocks and lands to found workingmen's clubs, art schools and colleges, that he might have more leisure for enriching his imagination and heart, chose to "be wealthy, not rich." Needing many forms of wisdom, our age needs none more than the grace to "live content with small means, seeking elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion."
[THE WORLD A WHISPERING GALLERY.]
When the sage counsels us "to listen to stars and birds, to babes and sages," he opens to us the secrets of the soul's increase in wisdom and happiness. All culture begins with listening. Growth is not through shrewd thinking or eloquent speaking, but through accurate seeing and hearing. Our world is one vast whispering gallery, yet only those who listen hear "the still, small voice" of truth. Putting his ear down to the rocks, the listening geologist hears the story of the rocks. Standing under the stars, the listening astronomer hears the music of the spheres. Leaving behind the din and dirt of the city, Agassiz plunged into the forests of the Amazon, and listening to boughs and buds and birds he found out all their secrets.
One of our wisest teachers has said, "The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world, is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk, for one who can think. But thousands can think for one who can see; to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one. Therefore finding the world of literature more or less divided into thinkers and seers, I believe we shall find also, that the seers are wholly the greater race of the two." For greatness is vision. Opening his eyes, Newton sees the planets revolve and finds his fame. Opening his ears, Watt hears the movement of steam and finds his fortune. Millet explained his fame by saying he copied the colors of the sunset at the moment when reapers bow the head in silent prayer. The great bard, too, tells us he went apart and listened to find "sermons in stones, and books in the running brooks."
THE SECRET OF CULTURE.
It is a proverb that pilgrims to foreign lands find only what they take with them. Riding over the New England hills near Boston, Lowell spake not to his companion, for now he was looking out upon the pageantry of a glorious October day, and now he remembered that this was the road forever associated with Paul Revere's ride. Reaching the outskirts of Cambridge, he roused from his reverie to discover that his silent companion had been brooding over bales and barrels, not knowing that this had been one of those rare days when October holds an art exhibit, and also oblivious to the fact that he had been passing through scenes historic through the valor of the brave boy.
Of the four artists copying the same landscape near Chamouni, all saw a different scene. To an idler a river means a fish pole, to a heated schoolboy a bath; to the man of affairs the stream suggests a turbine wheel; while the same stream leads the philosopher to reflect upon the influence of great rivers upon cities and civilizations. Coleridge thought the bank of his favorite stream was made to lie down upon, but Bunyan, beholding the stream through the iron bars of a prison cell, felt the breezes of the "Delectable Mountains" cool his fevered cheek, and stooping down he wet his parched lips with the river of the waters of life. Nature has no message for heedless, inattentive hearers. It is possible for a youth to go through life deaf to the sweetest sounds that ever fell over Heaven's battlements, and blind to the beauty of landscape and mountain and sea and sky. There is no music in the autumn wind until the listener comes. There is no order and beauty in the rolling spheres until some Herschel stands beneath the stars. There is no fragrance in the violet until the lover of flowers bends down above the blossoms.