Instead Of Cultivating The Earth For Wheat
And Potatoes, They Cultivate Literature, And Fill A Place In The
Republic Of Letters.
Or they would fain write for fame merely,
as others actually raise crops of grain to be distilled into
brandy.
Books are for the most part wilfully and hastily
written, as parts of a system, to supply a want real or imagined.
Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or
inventories of God's property, by some clerk. They do not in the
least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or
rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to
conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the
professors always dwell.
"To Athens gowned he goes, and from that school
Returns unsped, a more instructed fool."
They teach the elements really of ignorance, not of knowledge,
for, to speak deliberately and in view of the highest truths, it
is not easy to distinguish elementary knowledge. There is a
chasm between knowledge and ignorance which the arches of science
can never span. A book should contain pure discoveries, glimpses
of _terra firma_, though by shipwrecked mariners, and not the art
of navigation by those who have never been out of sight of land.
_They_ must not yield wheat and potatoes, but must themselves be
the unconstrained and natural harvest of their author's lives.
"What I have learned is mine; I've had my thought,
And me the Muses noble truths have taught."
We do not learn much from learned books, but from true, sincere,
human books, from frank and honest biographies. The life of a
good man will hardly improve us more than the life of a
freebooter, for the inevitable laws appear as plainly in the
infringement as in the observance, and our lives are sustained by
a nearly equal expense of virtue of some kind. The decaying
tree, while yet it lives, demands sun, wind, and rain no less
than the green one. It secretes sap and performs the functions
of health. If we choose, we may study the alburnum only. The
gnarled stump has as tender a bud as the sapling.
At least let us have healthy books, a stout horse-rake or a
kitchen range which is not cracked. Let not the poet shed tears
only for the public weal. He should be as vigorous as a
sugar-maple, with sap enough to maintain his own verdure, beside
what runs into the troughs, and not like a vine, which being cut
in the spring bears no fruit, but bleeds to death in the endeavor
to heal its wounds. The poet is he that hath fat enough, like
bears and marmots, to suck his claws all winter. He hibernates
in this world, and feeds on his own marrow. We love to think in
winter, as we walk over the snowy pastures, of those happy
dreamers that lie under the sod, of dormice and all that race of
dormant creatures, which have such a superfluity of life
enveloped in thick folds of fur, impervious to cold.
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