STUDY OVERDONE
When I see a morning procession of pallid schoolboys staggering to school under a load of text-books almost too heavy to be held together by the strap that encircles them, or a bevy of young girls, bound on the same educational errand, more pallid and more exhausted by the eight or ten pounds of torture in the shape of grammars, dictionaries, geographies, arithmetics, geometries and philosophies, they, too, tug along the streets, I wish their piles of knowledge might be reduced one-half, for I can not but feel that with fewer books there would be more culture, that too many studies produce too little scholarship, and that the intellect which is forced will rarely be expanded.—James T. Fields.
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Style—See [Personal Element in Literature].
SUBCONSCIOUS ABSORPTION
Coleridge relates in his “Literaria Biographia” that in a Roman Catholic town in Germany a young woman who could neither read nor write was seized with a fever, during which, according to the priests, she was possest by a polyglot devil. For she talked Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, besides uttering sounds which, tho not understood by her hearers, had doubtless, meaning, but belonged to languages unknown to them. “Whole sheets of her ravings were written out,” says Coleridge, “and were found to consist of sentences intelligible in themselves, but having slight connection with each other.” Fortunately, a physician who, being skeptically inclined, was disposed to question the theory of the polyglot spirit, “determined to trace back the girl’s history. After much trouble he discovered that at the age of nine she had been charitably taken by an old Protestant pastor, a great Hebrew scholar, in whose house she lived till his death. On further inquiry, it appeared to have been the old man’s custom for years to walk up and down a passage of his house, into which the kitchen opened, and to read to himself in a loud voice out of his books. The books were ransacked, and among them were found several of the Greek and Latin fathers, together with a collection of rabbinical writings. In these works so many of the passages taken down at the young woman’s bedside were identified that there could be no reasonable doubt as to their source.”—Prof. Richard A. Proctor, New York Mail and Express.
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Subjects a Necessity—See [Fame, Qualifying for].
SUBSTANCE AND SHADOW
When Elihu Root was about to enter the Roosevelt Cabinet as Secretary of State, a friend wrote to him: “Why not wait three years and get the substance instead of taking the shadow now?” in allusion to the presidency. Mr. Root replied: “I have always thought that the opportunity to do something worth doing was the substance and the trying to get something was the shadow.”