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WISDOM.

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on the ground of its specific usefulness to himself. He should cherish the thoughts of his own begetting with a loving care and a temperate discipline, they are the family of his mind and its chief reliance - but he should give a hospitable reception to guests and to travellers with stories of far countries, and the family should not be suffered to crowd the doors. Henry Taylor.

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Even without the stimulant of self-love, some minds, owing to a natural redundance of activity, and excess of velocity and fertility, cannot be sufficiently passive to be wise. A capability to take a thousand views of a subject is hard to be reconciled with directness and singleness of judgment; and he who can find a great deal to say for any view, will not often go the straight road to the one view that is right. If subtlety be added to exuberance, the judgment is still more endangered. lb.

A character endued with a large, vivacious, active in-. tellect, and a limited range of sympathies, generally remains immature. We can grow wise only through the experience which reaches us through our sympathies and becomes part of our life. Mrs. Jameson.

"Even if you were

Sterling writes to a young man: tempted to strike out a path of study for yourself, and by some sport of accident, hit upon a better than that in which you are directed, the moral loss would probably be far greater than the intellectual gain, the loss of

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humility, of quiet, of self-distrust, of teachableness, the peculiar Graces, or Charities of the Student."

Sterling.

If a man of genius be fortunately free from ambition, there is yet another enemy which will commonly lie in wait for his wisdom; to wit, a great capacity of enjoyment. The temptation by which such a man is assailed, consists in imagining that he has within himself and by virtue of his temperament, sources of joy altogether independent of conduct and circumstances. It is true that he has these sources on this unconditional tenure for a time; and it is owing to this very truth that his futurity is in danger, not in respect of wisdom only, but also in respect of happiness. And if we look to recorded examples, we shall find that a great capacity of enjoyment does ordinarily bring about the destruction of enjoyment in its own ulterior consequences, having uprooted wisdom by the way.

Wisdom is not wanted. The intellect, perhaps, amidst the abundance of its joys rejoices in wise contemplations; but wisdom is not adopted and domesticated in the mind, owing to the fearlessness of the heart. Henry Taylor.

When the master has not reason or judgment, understanding or discernment, the porter reported right of him, saying; there is nobody in the house. Sadi.

Literary dissipation is no less destructive of sympathy

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with the living world, than sensual dissipation. Mere intellect is as hard-hearted and as heart-hardening as mere sense. Nor is there any repugnance in either to coalesce with the other. Guesses at Truth.

My preconceived opinion of the scholars and higher classes in Italy has proved perfectly correct. There are individual exceptions as regards erudition, but, even in these cases, there is not that cultivation of the whole man which we deem indispensable. I have become acquainted with two or three literary men of real ability; but they are like statues wrought to be placed in a frieze on the wall; the side turned towards you is of finished beauty, the other unhewn stone. They are much what our scholars may have been sixty or eighty years ago. No one feels himself a citizen. Not only are the people destitute of hope, they have not even wishes respecting the affairs of the world; and all the springs of great and noble thoughts and feelings are choked up. Niebuhr.

All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul. But it is not only the work of the whole creature, it likewise addresses the whole creature. That in which the perfect being speaks, must also have the perfect being to listen. I am not to spend my utmost spirit, and give all my strength and life to my work, while you, spectator or hearer, will give me only the attention of half your soul. You must be all mine, as I am all yours; it is the only condition on

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which we can meet each other. All your faculties, all that is in you of greatest and best, must be awake in you, or I have no reward. The painter is not to cast

the entire treasure of his human nature into his labor merely to please a part of the beholder: not merely to delight his senses, not merely to amuse his fancy, not merely to beguile him into emotion, not merely to lead him into thought; but to do all this. Senses, fancy, feeling, reason, the whole of the beholding spirit, must be stilled in attention or stirred with delight; else the laboring spirit has not done its work well. For observe, it is not merely its right to be thus met, face to face, heart to heart; but it is its duty to evoke this answering of the other soul: its trumpet call must be so clear, that though the challenge may by dulness or indolence be unanswered, there shall be no error as to the meaning of the appeal; there must be a summons in the work, which it shall be our own fault if we do not obey. We require this of it, we beseech this of it. Most men do not know what is in them, till they receive this summons from their fellows : their hearts die within them, sleep settles upon them, the lethargy of the world's miasmata; there is nothing for which they are so thankful as for that cry, "Awake, thou that sleepest." And this cry must be most loudly uttered to their noblest faculties; first of all, to the imagination, for that is the most tender, and the soonest struck into numbness by the poisoned air: so that one of the main functions of art, in its service to man, is to rouse the imagination from its palsy, like the angel troubling the

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Bethesda pool; and the art which does not do this is false to its duty, and degraded in its nature. It is not enough that it be well imagined, it must task the beholder also to imagine well; and this so imperatively, that if he does not choose to rouse himself to meet the work, he shall not taste it, nor enjoy it in any wise.

Whatever may be the means, or whatever the more immediate end of any kind of art; all of it that is good agrees in this, that it is the expression of one soul talking to another, and is precious according to the greatness of the soul that utters it. Ruskin.

Those do not act well, who in a solitary exclusive manner, follow moral cultivation by itself. He who strives for a development of that kind, has likewise every reason, at the same time, to improve his finer sentient powers; that so he may not run the risk of sinking from his moral height, by giving way to the enticements of a lawless fancy, and degrading his moral nature by allowing it to take delight in tasteless baubles, if not in something worse. Goethe.

All the parts of our sentimental nature are finely connected. Therefore any tendency to moral sensibility will be strengthened by the delicacy given to the sentient nature generally, by familiarity with art and nature.

Wright.

My Illustrious Friend, and joy of my Liver! - The

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