* * * * *
I wish you, by the aid of the training which I recommend, to be able to
look beyond your own lives and have pleasure in surroundings different
from those in which you move. I want you to be able--and mark this
point--to sympathize with other times, to be able to understand the men
and women of other countries, and to have the intense enjoyment--an
enjoyment which I am sure you would all appreciate--of mental change of
scene. I do not only want you to know dry facts; I am not only looking
to a knowledge of facts, nor chiefly to that knowledge. I want the
heart to be stirred as well as the intellect. I want you to feel more
and live more than you can do if you only know what surrounds
yourselves. I want the action of the imagination, the sympathetic study
of history and travels, the broad teaching of the poets, and, indeed, of
the best writers of other times and other countries, to neutralize and
check the dwarfing influences of necessarily narrow careers and
necessarily stunted lives. That is the point which you will see I mean
when I ask you to cultivate the imagination. I want to introduce you to
other, wider, and nobler fields of thought, and to open up vistas of
other worlds, when refreshing and bracing breezes will stream upon your
minds and souls. GEORGE JOACHIM GOSCHEN.