Firelight in a room is just the same thing—a grey stone fireplace with red embers is the very heart of a winter house.... If there had not been a vital significance back of our discovery of the day, our sense of a brick's beauty would have been untimely and disordered....
Such were the points brought out as we walked. The episode is indicative of the days here. The best hours are always spontaneous. I am always occupied with my own affairs until the moment of Chapel, but Nature is invariably safe and replete. There are a thousand analogies for every event of the human spirit, even for the resurrection of the human soul. The plan is one.
The day would have been poorly spent, no matter what I might say, without an expression from the others on the beauty conception. It is the union again of receiving and expressing that makes growth and character. They would not try to remember what I said. Memory is not the faculty I cared to cultivate. The endeavour here is from the spirit outward. I do not wish to fill their brains, but to inspire their souls to fill their own brains. All work is a training for the expression of the real self. We are infinitely greater than our brains. If I can arrive at the truth of any subject, I need have no worry about sleepy heads or Inertia. A disclosure of truth, and the process of it made clear, is the perfect awakener, for truth is the aliment of the soul. It is not what I say, but what a truth suggests to them, that determines the value of their expression of it.
Expression is the triumph. Every time the brain gives expression to the real self, there is a memorable vitality, not only in the expression, but strength and authority added to the brain itself. This is training for writers, but words are the natural implements for us all.... So the ardent aim of the classes here is to awaken the deeper vitalities of those who listen. When one awakens a soul interest, you may rely upon it the brain is open to its full zest and capacity. Pattering of uncohered facts upon the temporal surface of the brain in the effort to lodge them in the tentacles of memory, does not construct the character of man or woman.
The superb flower of any educational work is the occasional disclosure of the real bent of a student. That is always like the discovery of el dorado. The most important fact to be considered in any educational ideal is that the soul of every one has its own especial treasures and bestowals; and when one succeeds in touching with fresh fire an ancient facility or proclivity in the breast of a boy or girl—the rest is but following the gleam.... The world finds us significant, even heroic, only in so far as we give expression to a power intrinsic.
Another day we found more water-worn bricks. An old brick house long ago had rubbed itself into the falling bank, and now its parts are spread along certain portions of the shore and buried in the sand. The boys brought in a half-bushel of this red treasure, and we set about constructing a narrow cement walk of quality. Our idea was to carry out and make perpetual the affinity of the red gleams as insets in a grey pebble walk.
We worked raptly, even through the hard, dull labour of levelling, setting the frames and laying the concrete foundation. The finishing was the absorbing part. The idea was not for a fine-grained sand walk, but a mixture of all sizes from a penny large down to the finest sand. The cement makes the most lasting bond in a mixture of this kind; moreover, the pebbly finish was effective and darker for the insets.
The walk was less than two feet wide and roughly squared by pieces of shingle laid in the concrete, tip to tip. The final dressing, two inches of pebble mortar, looked unpromising on account of its coating of white. It would have hardened a dingy cement colour, instead of the deep, sparkling grey desired, had we not thought of turning a fine spray from the hose upon the newly trowelled surface to wash away the top cement. To make sure, the surface was then lightly sponged until the pebble-tops were absolutely without the clinging white. The water also erased the least mark of the trowel.
The red insets were now tamped in with the trowel-handle, the unique round edges appearing without a touch of stain. The rapidly hardening mortar was not packed about the brick pieces, but the natural edge of the grey preserved, as if they had been hurled in. They were placed without immediate regularity, but with relation to the walk in its length.... We regarded it afterward in the rain—all frames and shingles removed, the loam and humus of the rose-soil softening the border—the red rounded edges of the brick-insets gleaming out of the grey—a walk that seemed to have been there a thousand years, the red pieces seemingly worn by the bare feet of centuries.... It satisfied, and the thought, too, that those who helped to do the work could not be quite the same after that afternoon.