I remember the very day when the schoolmaster gave it to me.... And I
remember that the rather stern and aquiline face of our teacher relaxed
into mildness for a moment. Both we and our books must have looked very
fresh and new to him, though we may all be a little battered now; at
least, my _New Latin Tutor_ is. It is a very precious book, and it
should be robed in choice Turkey morocco, were not the very covers too
much a part of the association to be changed. For between them I
gathered the seed-grain of many harvests of delight; through this low
archway I first looked upon the immeasurable beauty of words....
What liquid words were these: _aqua_, _aura_, _unda_! All English poetry
that I had yet learned by heart--it is only children who learn by heart,
grown people "commit to memory"--had not so awakened the vision of what
literature might mean. Thenceforth all life became ideal....
Then human passion, tender, faithful, immortal, came also by and
beckoned. "But let me die," she said. "Thus, thus it delights me to go
under the shades." Or that infinite tenderness, the stronger even for
its opening moderation of utterance, the last sigh of Aeneas after
Dido,--
Nec me meminisse pigebit Elissam
Dum memor ipse mihi, dum spiritus hos regit artus....
Or, with more definite and sublime grandeur, the vast forms of Roman
statesmanship appear: "Today, Romans, you behold the commonwealth, the
lives of you all, estates, fortunes, wives and children, and the seat of
this most renowned empire, this most fortunate and beautiful city,
preserved and restored to you by the distinguished love of the immortal
gods, and by my toils, counsels, and dangers."
What great thoughts were found within these pages, what a Roman vigor
was in these maxims! "It is Roman to do and suffer
bravely." "It is sweet and glorious to die for one's country." "He that
gives himself up to pleasure, is not worthy the name of a man."...
There was nothing harsh or stern in this book, no cynicism, no
indifference; but it was a flower-garden of lovely out-door allusions, a
gallery of great deeds; and as I have said before, it formed the child's
first real glimpse into the kingdom of words.
I was once asked by a doctor of divinity, who was also the overseer of a
college, whether I ever knew any one to look back with pleasure upon his
early studies in Latin and Greek. It was like being asked if one looked
back with pleasure on summer mornings and evenings. No doubt those
languages, like all others, have fared hard at the hands of pedants; and
there are active boys who hate all study, and others who love the
natural sciences alone. Indeed, it is a hasty assumption, that the
majority of boys hate Latin and Greek. I find that most college
graduates, at least, retain some relish for the memory of such studies,
even if they have utterly lost the power to masticate or digest them.
"Though they speak no Greek, they love the sound on't." Many a
respectable citizen still loves to look at his Horace or Virgil on the
shelf where it has stood undisturbed for a dozen years; he looks, and
thinks that he too lived in Arcadia.... The books link him with culture,
and universities, and the traditions of great scholars.
On some stormy Sunday, he thinks, he will take them down. At length he
tries it; he handles the volume awkwardly, as he does his infant; but it
is something to be able to say that neither book nor baby has been
actually dropped. He likes to know that there is a tie between him and
each of these possessions, though he is willing, it must be owned, to
leave the daily care of each in more familiar hands....
I must honestly say that much of the modern outcry against classical
studies seems to me to be (as in the case of good Dr. Jacob Bigelow) a
frank hostility to literature itself, as the supposed rival of science;
or a willingness (as in Professor Atkinson's
case) to tolerate modern literature, while discouraging the study of the
ancient. Both seem to commit the error of drawing their examples of
abuse from England, and applying their warnings to America.... Because
the House of Commons was once said to care more for a false quantity in
Latin verse than in English morals, shall we visit equal indignation on
a House of Representatives that had to send for a classical dictionary
to find out who Thersites was?...
Granted, that foreign systems of education may err by insisting on the
arts of literary structure too much; think what we should lose by
dwelling on them too little! The magic of mere words; the mission of
language; the worth of form as well as of matter; the power to make a
common thought immortal in a phrase, so that your fancy can no more
detach the one from the other than it can separate the soul and body of
a child; it was the veiled half revelation of these things that made
that old text-book forever fragrant to me. There are in it the still
visible traces of wild flowers which I used to press between the pages,
on the way to school; but it was the pressed flowers of Latin poetry
that were embalmed there first. These are blossoms that do not fade.
--Thomas Wentworth Higginson