The youth who plans the life of affairs is in danger of despising the
brooding that feeds the hidden life. We can never rightly estimate our
indebtedness to those who have gone apart to "think quietly."
All law and jurisprudence go back to Moses for forty years brooding in an
empty, voiceless desert upon the principles of eternal justice. All
astronomy goes back to Ptolemy, who looked out upon a weary waste of sand
and turned his vision toward a highway paved with stars and suns. Our
poetry and literature begins with Homer, blind indeed to earthly sights and
sciences, but who traced with an inner eye, the strifes of gods and men,
and gave his inner thoughts immortal form and beauty. All modern science
begins with that scholar who for fifty years was unknown in the forum or
market-place, for Charles Darwin was "studying hard and thinking quietly"
in his little garden, where he watched his seeds, earthworms, his beetles
and doves.
The air of London is so charged with deadly acids that the lime tree alone
flourishes there, for the reason that it sheds its bark each year, thus
casting off the defiled garment. But there is a mountain peak in the
Himalayas so high that it towers beyond the reach of snows and rains, and a
scientist has said, an open page might there remain unsoiled by dust
through passing centuries. And to those who "think quietly" it is given to
rise into the upper air. Dwelling upon the heights, these may look down
upon all heated centers with their soot and grime, their stacked houses,
reeking gutters, the din and noise of wheels, the hoarse roar of the
clashing streets, and in these hours of reverie, the soul marvels that it
was ever tossed about upon these furious currents of ambition.
Hours there are when Fame whispers, "Joy is not in me." Ambition, worn with
its fierce fever, whispers, "Joy is not in me." Success confesses, "Joy is
not in me." In such hours happy the youth who has learned in solitude to go
apart and find that happiness that "the world can neither give nor take
away."