When all the caravans of knowledge have gone trooping through the eye-gate
and the ear-gate into the soul city, Channing reminds us that these
knowledges must be assorted and assimilated by "studying hard and thinking
quietly."
If some rich men fill their shelves with books that are never read, some
poor men fill their memory with facts upon which they never think. The mere
accumulation of truths about earth and air, about plants and animals and
men, does not mean culture. Education does not mean stuffing the mind with
Greek roots, as the husbandman stuffs his granary with vegetables. It is a
proverb, that no fool is a perfect fool until he can talk Latin. Looking
out upon land and sea and sky, the educated soul sees all, and appreciates
all. Culture lends the note of distinction and acquaints the youth with all
the best that has been said and done. Trying to steal the secret of the
honey bee, a scientist extracted the sweets of half an acre of blossoms.
Unfortunately, the vat of liquor proved to be only sweetened water. By its
secret processes, the bee distills the same liquor into honey. It is
possible for the youth to sweep into the memory a thousand great facts
without having distilled one of these honeyed drops named wisdom and
culture.
In studying the French Revolution Carlyle read five hundred volumes,
including reports of officers, generals, statesmen, spies, heroes,
villains. Then, closing all the books, he journeyed into Scotland. In
solitude he "thought quietly." Having brooded alone for weeks and months,
one morning he rose to dip his pen in his heart's blood and write his
French Revolution. In that hour the knowledge that had been in five hundred
books became the culture distilled into one.