Chautauqua Institution

“ The priests of learning bid you come, that they may open to you the mysteries of literature. For in the republic of letters there is no aristocracy but that of service. And they only are great who have learned how best to serve their fellow-men.
The triumph that I read in your eyes is not a false triumph. You have plucked the first fruits, and all the other brightest and best are before you for your plucking. The expectation that I read in your eyes is not a delusive expectation. The fruit is yours. The desire that I read in your eyes is not a cheating desire. ”

“ What man—with all his sound and fury, his hammering and clanking—has never achieved, is thus quietly done in summer days by every green leaf in God’s world, and inorganic matter is forced to live. While the sun shines these honest workers are striving with all their might to lay hold of every atom of this gas that fouls the atmosphere for animals, and thus, while finding food for themselves, they are keeping the air sweet and pure for other living things. ”

“ Man is only a reed, the weakest plant of nature, but he is a thinking reed. It is not necessary that the whole universe should be in arms to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water is sufficient to put him out of existence. But even though the universe could crush him to atoms, man would still be more noble than that which kills him, because he is conscious that he is dying, and of the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing.—Pascal. ”

“ We turn auriferous quartz into coin, iron ore into a body for the soul of electricity, but mind had to be developed and refined first. Rome sought wealth by the robbery of other nations, but she never gained as much wealth in a decade as we develop from nature in a year. What we need as a nation is a perpetual push and effort of the masses of men to rise. They drag down none of the few that are already eminent, but, by surpassing them, incite to greater attainments. Let there be no fear that there will be too many great men, or men too great. ”

“ Not only may we pluck a single blossom, and here and there a single half-ripened fruit from this tree; but the ripest, the best, that which has hung the longest in the sun-light, that whose cheeks are painted the most rosy red, and whose heart has in it the most saccharine juice, that is ready to-day to fall into our open palm if we will but extend it. ”

“ Now, science, even more than revelation, has been enlarging our conceptions of this universe. The Holy Land, a province about as large as Vermont, is no longer the earth; the Atlantic and the Pacific are the great seas; this globe on which we live is but one of the smaller globes of the planetary system; and the great planetary system itself is but a smaller one of the great planetary systems which are circling around some vast and distant sun. Science has taught us too that all this universe is linked together, bound together by a common law, bound together by a common order of phenomena. ”

“ When we begin to look attentively at the world around us, one of the first things to set us thinking is the air. We do not see it, and yet it is present wherever we may go. What is this air?
Although invisible, it is yet a real, material substance. When you swing your arm rapidly up and down you feel the air offering a resistance to the hand. The air is something which you can feel, though you can not see it. You breathe it every moment. You can not get away from it, for it completely surrounds the earth. To this outer envelope of air, the name of atmosphere is given. ”

“ There are stars so distant that he would see not Chautauqua gathered here to-night, but the crucifixion of Christ taking place on the hill of Calvary; stars so distant, that with a telescope powerful enough to carry the message of this world to his sight, he would see Abraham coming out of the land of his idolatry into the promised land; stars so distant that he would see this earth first taking on its brightness in the birth-day of its glory. So vast is our universe that the mind can not attempt to comprehend its majestic distances. ”

“ As the tree grows from the seed planted in the ground—first the little bud peering above the surface, then the stalk, and then the branches, and by and by the completed oak; as the child grows from the babe in the cradle, taking on one new faculty and one power after another till he comes into as yet incompleted manhood—for the completion of manhood lies afar off in the dim, distant and invisible future—so the nations of the earth, and so the whole race of man has been developed from the seed to the oak and from the babe in the cradle to manhood in its maturity ”

“ To study literature is not to study language. Language is merely the instrument which we use for the study of literature. To study literature is to study life—life in its outward semblance or life in its inward experiences. It is to study the life of the community and of society as we study it in Thackeray; or it is to study the life of the brain and the thought as we study it in Plato and Bacon ”

“ It can not be denied, that while to almost every man’s door are daily wafted accurate records of passing history, of the discoveries of science, of the triumphs of art, and of the generalizations of philosophy, the same messengers no less sedulously exhibit, now faintly and now in the strongest light, every difficulty connected with the Bible, both real and imaginary, the boldest objections of historic criticism, the theories of speculative philosophy, the apparent contradictions of science and scripture, and the saddening conflicts of professing Christians. ”

“ I learned more of Homer—of his life, of his character, of the lessons he has to teach, of the man himself—from reading in the “Ancient Classics for English Readers,” the Iliad and the Odyssey, and from reading Bryant’s translation, than I ever received from reading Homer himself in the original Greek in my college class. That which is highest, and supremest, and best in literature, you may obtain without a college education. You may learn the life, you may learn the man, you may learn the sacred truth; and you can not do that without broadening your sympathies and developing your charity. ”

“ All small barbaric or archaic work of the ancient Egyptians in sculpture has perished in the vast lapse of time. But this one monument, raised at least 4,000 years before the Christian era, stands to prove, with its companion pyramids, the wonderful power of conception, the energy and practical skill which characterized the early Egyptians. What they lacked in ideas of beauty, they made up for by the simple grandeur in the colossal size and perfection in execution. ”

“ Your mind now runs over the histories you have studied, and you recall the orators who, through the power of speech alone, have revolutionized empires, advanced or checked civilization. What pleasure to the mind and heart, to be able in our leisure hours to sit with Herodotus, Macaulay, Motley, Bancroft, and a host of others, and hear them tell their historic stories! or with David, Homer, Shakspere, Whittier and Bryant, and let them fill our minds with the beautiful and soothing words of poetry! Does not art, in a still more condensed form, give us the history of the nations of the past? ”

“ Alas for us, if the time ever comes when we grow careless or indifferent respecting our colleges or universities, and the kind of culture which they give; but they give culture that the cultured may give us fruit. The few garner; the heaviest are for all.
Nor is it possible for one thus to study the history of the human race, to see how, little by little, liberty has grown, education has grown, humanity has grown, and not grow himself in faith in an overruling Providence, and in hope in the Supreme God. ”

“ After sunset, when the sky is clear, you know that the grass gets wet with dew. In the morning you may see mists hanging over woods, and streams, and hills, and gradually melting away as the sun mounts in the sky. At all times of the year you may watch how clouds form and dissolve, and form again, ever changing their size and shape as they move through the air. Now these are all examples of the condensation of vapor. ”

“ What a wonderful mechanism is this nature which we study! And we study this mechanism partly that we may use it, that we may lay hold on these great forces of nature and make them subservient to our will by understanding the laws which regulate and govern them. But nature is more than a machine; nature is also a book, and a wonderful book, written all over in hieroglyphics that require study for their apprehension. It is more than a mechanism. ”

“ The publication of Waverley marked a new era in romantic literature.
During the eighty years that have followed that publication mankind has had its hopes, longings, ambitions and jealousies mirrored in works of fiction. Hundreds, ay, thousands of novels—most of them unworthy of their high lineage—have contended with each other for the world’s approbation; writers without number have flooded the century with romance; but through all these years Walter Scott stands the acknowledged master, the purest-hearted, the noblest-minded of them all ”

“ Those southern soldiers and statesmen saw, in truth, with a terrible sense of overhanging fate, that race of hardy, chaste, home-loving, free and fearless barbarians, of whom the Emperor Titus said, ‘Their bodies are great, but their souls are greater.’ The tone of Tacitus is that of a man who bitterly feels how much greater, after all, as a moral being, the barbarian may be than the civilized man, when civilization recognizes no higher aim than material splendor, and that utility which subserves material wants. ”

“ The force of the argument obviously rests on the assumption that nothing more than, or outside, matter can be transmitted from parent to child; that a particular constitution of brain and nerve centres, a special arrangement or combination of the elements which compose the mind-organ, may be reproduced, and, if it is, a similarity of character will be entailed; but as for the independent existence of mind, or spirit, that is a pure figment of the imagination, which science will sooner or later drive beyond the pale of credulity, and to which, even now, only a few thinkers avowedly cling! ”

“ It is finite mechanism and finite thought that invent geometry and theology. Men hang, cunningly and truly, their long counter-shafts of creed, of behavior, of thought, of dress, of consistency, of loyalty; they bolt and key thereto immovably all human characters which are round, “line them up” all true and uniform, lubricate with lucre, put on the steam and away they all go beautifully and all alike. Woe be to one who wabbles in this machine-shop of society! ”

“ Not that it tells anything new to one who has studied deeply the pages of that terrible book of modern life, with its gilded leaves, but its unutterably dark contents; it only focuses the scattered knowledge into alarmingly clear vision. Indeed, in reading it, it is difficult to resist the old nightmare feeling, that after all this little planet may be the small rotary Vaudeville theater of the universe, where we poor actors in life’s scene are playing out a series of farces for the amusement of the angels, or more probably of darker and more distant visitants. ”

“ Not only is it not necessary that a man should study language in order to study literature; in innumerable cases the study of the language has absolutely interfered with the study of the literature. In innumerable cases, men at college have ground away, day after day, and month after month, and year after year, over cases and nouns and parts of speech, and rules of syntax and rules of grammar—working only at the grammar, and utterly oblivious of the great light that lay behind it. ”

“ He had become celebrated throughout New England as a marvelous prodigy in the despised sect of “shouting Methodists” years before he could read a text or “line” a hymn. And to the day of his death his preaching knew no method, his eloquence no logic, his conduct no consistency, and his power no limit or restraint. To this day no one has succeeded in analyzing his genius. He could not himself account for his power, nor could he control it. ”

“ To-day in Puritan Connecticut, the minister can not tie the marriage bond much faster than the courts across the street can dissolve it. We have yet to learn that marriage is more than a civil contract, that it is an ordinance of God; that he who made man and woman made them that these twain should become one flesh, and made the home to be the first Church and the first State. When we have learned that, we shall have learned the foundation of the home as we have learned the foundation of the State. To study philosophy is to study the laws which govern society in its organism. ”

“ No sooner has death overtaken any plant than a host of them set to work to clear away the now useless organism from the world, breaking down herbaceousness into putrescence, timber into touchwood, and all at last into vegetable mould. Their mission is to seize upon decaying matter and endow it with life in a new form; and thus out of rottenness often comes wholesomeness, decay moulding itself into pleasant mushrooms, or into things unfit for human food perhaps, but that may bring the blessings of abundance to many little living creatures. ”

“ We do not need to understand the laws of heat and steam to use them; some one has learned the laws, and has brought fire and water together and has pronounced a nuptial blessing over them, and a child has been born of the marriage, and we take steam for our slave without knowing the ritual which married the father and mother. Some one must have learned how to reach his hand to the cloud, and bring down the electricity, make it run our errands and serve the purpose of our illumination ”

“ We all know what a pleasant faint rustle of leaves there is above, and what a flickering of mellowed sunlight comes over the eyes, and how these steal into the heart with a sense of soft content, till we are apt to become like little children, enjoying without much thought, yielding ourselves up to the delight of the mere living, letting our consciousness float along lazily on the current of being. ”

“ The son of the carpenter lived that he might teach, among the other lessons, this lesson of the democracy of learning; that learning, in its higher and more valued forms, is for the mechanic busy at his bench, for the smith grimy with toil at his forge, for the mother busiest of all, with hands and brain and heart filled with her children. ”