To know how to suggest is the great art of teaching. To attain it we
must be able to guess what will interest; we must learn to read the
childish soul as we might a piece of music. Then, by simply changing the
key, we keep up the attraction and vary the song.
The germs of all things are in every heart, and the greatest criminals
as well as the greatest heroes are but different modes of ourselves.
Only evil grows of itself, while for goodness we want effort and
courage.
Melancholy is at the bottom of everything, just as at the end of all
rivers is the sea. Can it be otherwise in a world where nothing lasts,
where all that we have loved or shall love must die? Is death, then, the
secret of life? The gloom of an eternal mourning enwraps, more or less
closely, every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the
universe.
A man takes to "piety" from a thousand different reasons--from imitation
or from eccentricity, from bravado or from reverence, from shame of the
past or from terror of the future, from weakness and from pride, for
pleasure's sake or for punishment's sake, in order to be able to judge,
or in order to escape being judged, and for a thousand other reasons;
but he only becomes truly religious for religion's sake.
January 11, 1865.--It is pleasant to feel nobly--that is to say, to live
above the lowlands of vulgarity.
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