William Blaikie

“ And at New London, the Thames, so pinched, and full of eel-grass in one portion, that even two crews cannot fairly row abreast, is really an arm of Long Island Sound, close by; and is so affected by every tide that the number of hours for either racing or practice is hardly two in twelve; while every breeze at all southerly is likely to knock up such a sea as to make it unfit for shell-rowing. Men who have made great preparation and sacrifice for the most important athletic contest of their lives might at least be guaranteed a first-class track, a worthy arena for such an arduous struggle. ”

“ If the man who habitually works too long without a rest would every hour or so turn lightly from his work, for even sixty seconds, to some vigorous exercise right in his office, or even in the next room or hall-way, until the blood got out of his brain a little, and the muscles tingled with a hearty glow, he would go back so refreshed as to quickly make up, both in the quantity and quality of his work, for the time lost. ”

“ But you take those thirty-two mighty minds, let them concentrate on winning that wonderful battle, greater than any peaceful one yet fought on any water; not excluding that between Mnestheus and Cloanthus, and all their famous triremes—get all that intellect, all that force, all that resistless will-power, and fighting-power incarnate, packed into those dainty, glistening racing-shells—thirty-two men with the racing spirit of thirty-two thousand coiled up in their great brains—and name the winner if you can! ”

“ No other great editor whom America has yet produced can so quickly throw his ablest rivals off their guard, till they descend to the resort of most people who run out of argument—personal abuse. Always master of his case; buttressing it with clear, ringing arguments, drawn from a marvellous storehouse of knowledge, both of the present and of the past, pressed home with relentless logic; despising all private gain and emolument; whoever differing, faces him, knows that he will have all the fighting he wants, and the fighting always of a gentleman. ”

“ Where better can you learn true fair play than in an open, terrible struggle, in a field where all is fair to all; and only the best can win? Who can know what justice is so well as he who has risked even his very life to win it? To whom else is fair play so dear? Who so keen to see the least unfair advantage had by another? No wonder the Henley and Putney records improve with age! And that one of the sweetest things in a man's whole life is to have won on Henley water. ”

“ But for a third of a century, there has been at work, in that same Massachusetts, a man hardly yet showing silver in his hair; one not so favored with facility for scientific research, and what books may teach; but who, in actual practice right upon the battle-field, in the thick of the struggle, side by side, and shoulder to shoulder with his pupil, has put his whole heart and soul into making that pupil get all the good he could do him. ”

“ When I look round me on this great company of busy and successful lawyers, resting for a moment from their never-ending labors; when I study the lines which time has traced upon their features, I can easily see that success in our profession rests everywhere upon the same foundation. It is the same old story of the sound mind and the honest heart in the sound body. The sound body is at the bottom of it all. The stomach is indeed the key of all professional eminence. ”

“ A man for the times—a man to head a new movement; the forces of an age of protest and rebellion and conquest."
Not unusual strength merely; not great strength merely; "Herculean physical strength!" Like that of Zeus's famous son,—the strongest man of all mythology. Look at the face; the jowl; the neck; the way the head is set upon the shoulders; the deep, massive shoulders themselves; that chest; and the vast back-head. In some portraits, his head and that of Tom Sayers, one of the greatest and bravest prize-fighters England ever had, are almost alike. An ugly man to run up against. ”

“ Four blocks are now done, and so is the policeman; and bringing up all-standing—blown, gasping, exhausted—he cannot even muster breath enough to shout, but, reaching his big hand out in front of him, and looking at the young person gently fleeting, with seemingly unabated vigor, into the dim distance, he sadly points to him, for that is all he is just now equal to. Fortunately for the interests of justice and good order, that point is well taken, for a brother officer sees it, and, rising to the occasion, dashes off after the misguided young person up the avenue. ”

“ Even at this day the imagination can paint the tall form of the young provincial lieutenant—not as it appeared more than half a century later, in its dignified repose on the bench, robed in the judicial gown and slightly bent with the weight of years—but, animated with the enthusiasm of the soldier, erect, vigorous, and athletic, rising above those frail breastworks, and urging on thy bravest of the troops to defend their position against the assault of the enemy.... ”

“ Medical men say that a few hours of it a day is enough. Yet here this marvellous man, not content with calling on his genius daily for what would be rational and ample, forces through a maze of work in his great thought-factory, so connected, varied, and intricate that it seems almost incredible that one man could have done it all, even in a hundred years. And then on top of it he takes the very hour set apart for change and recreation, and studying every odd character and strange sign and queer freak wherever he goes, gives himself, in all probability, double work through nearly all of it. ”

“ He had brought another conception of freedom into the German civilization. There was in German life and character a hardness and narrowness which, although intimately allied to energy and honesty, hindered the free movement of human nature, and constrained it within the boundaries of the most singular prejudices. These were melted down by Goethe's influence, and human nature breathed more freely; to his time his was a gospel of freedom, progress, power, and happiness. It will hold a certain authority in every age, because it contains a certain proportion of truth. ”

“ Justice, after all, is to prevail, for lo! a third pursuer has now caught the trail, and is off like a fast mail-train. Have a care now, young man! No brass buttons adorn your pursuer this time; but the self-appointed private citizen, now in your wake, runs as the wicked flee. There is no cart-horse pace about his work; but with one clean, business-like spurt, he swoops down on the now disturbed young man, and, clutching his upper garments, holds him neatly until the reserves come up, and then hands him over for his six months on the island. ”

“ Hating luxury; a despiser of flattery; and without a tinge of vanity. Extremely charitable; a great cultivator and most liberal promoter of the arts; a noble patron of learning; easy of access; delighting in strangers of eminence; and patient in hearing suitors. Like all really great men, he had an untiring vigor of mind, which seemed to grasp everything, from universal empire to the common people. No amount of labor wearied him; nothing was too great, nothing too little, to engage his attention. ”

“ And when we reflect that a mind educated to a high degree, with a neglected body, is like an axe with a razor-edge and no back to it,—a rare tool to whittle with, but worthless for felling timber; that the body trained to a high degree, with a neglected mind, is an axe all back, and with its edge as blunt as our finger-ends—fit for neither whittling nor felling, nor for much of anything else worthy of a man—but that, with the two combined,—the keen edge and the splendid back behind it,—you can hew down whole forests till you have cleared a continent ”

“ A small man completes his education before he is twenty-five. A great man is a man who, like Bismarck, never does complete his education at all; he goes on learning all his life, from every one he meets; from everything he sees; from everything he does himself, or that any one else does. No one is too small to act as tutor for a really great mind; as no one is too great to be unintelligible to the always growing powers of such a mind. It is because he had such a mind as this—not because of his university education—that Bismarck became the leader of the Germanic race. ”

“ Learning, in a broken body, is like a sword without a handle; like a load in a broken-wheeled cart; like artillery with no gun-carriage." And at thirty-two he wrote on a fly-leaf of an educational agricultural book, begun January 10, 1845: "It is my deliberate conviction that physical labor is indispensable to intellectual and moral health; that the industrial and producing interests of society are powerful conservators of morals. Especially do I regard the tillage of the soil as conducive to life, health, morals, and manhood." ”

“ And is there any need of pointing out to a spirited girl the value of a sound, healthy, and shapely body? Is there any sphere in woman's life where it will not stand her in good stead, and render her far more efficient at whatever she is called on to do—as daughter, sister, wife or mother, teacher or friend—and far more attractive as well? ”

“ Here, then, is a man who is in serious danger of being cut off from that rest and recreation which most other men can have. The long, steady strain, day and evening, often breaks him down; where an hour's active exercise daily on the road or on the water, with his business for the time scrupulously forgotten; together with from a quarter to half an hour, on rising and retiring, in strengthening his arms and chest, would have kept him as tough and fresh as they did Bryant, not simply up to sixty, or even seventy, but clear up to his eighty-fourth year; or Gladstone to his eighty-eighth. ”

“ It is the versatile working of Shakespeare's intellect that lenders his supremacy unassailable. His mind, as Hazlitt suggested, contains within itself the germs of every faculty and feeling. He knew intuitively how every faculty and feeling would develop, in every conceivable change of fortune. Men and women, good or bad old or young, wise or foolish, merry or sad, rich or poor, yielded their secrets to him; and his genius illumined in turn every aspect of humanity that presents itself on the highway of life. ”

“ His daring imagination gives him the more solid grasp of facts; as the birds of highest flight have the strongest alar bones. His patrician polish, his intrinsic evidence, edged by an irony so subtle that it stings and paralyzes, adorns the soundest health and strength of frame. According to the old sentence, 'If Jove should descend to the earth, he would speak in the style of Plato.' He has a probity, a native reverence for justice and honor; and a humanity which makes him tender for the superstitions of the people. ”

“ The preparation necessary to it will not compare in its exhausting effects with what the war-policeman—the soldier, who is not paid a quarter as much—must do without a murmur: the long forced marching, weighted like a pack-horse, the broken sleep, the stinted food, the bad shoes, the long absence from home, and the lack of all comforts. Why not insist on a regime which, if the fat man could go through and retain his corporosity, would make him welcome to retain it; if the thin man could be up to every day's work in it, then he could stand far more than he looked equal to? ”

“ Every one knows some youth, or young man, of rare promise—many a parent has a son whom he believes to be such—but his body—well, it does not look as if his stay here would be long. No equilibrium between mind and body there.
Is there no help? If only some way could be found to make that body hale, strong, enduring; so that, push his intellect—genius even—all that a rational man should, his body would every time respond to the demand; and his physical reserve be ample for many an over-draft as well—what a blessing that would be—the saving even of the man ”

“ Actually nothing is done to render the body lithe and supple, to develop the idle muscles, to deepen the breathing and quicken the circulation—in short, to tone up the whole system. No wonder such a day's work, and such a way of living, leaves the body tired and exhausted. It would, before long, do the same for the strongest man. No wonder that the walk to and from [p.59] work is a listless affair. No wonder that, later on, special or general weakness develops, and the woman goes through life either weak and delicate, or with not half the strength and vigor which might readily be hers. ”

“ To whom Thomas Erskine—the greatest forensic orator England ever saw—wrote in 1796: "I have a large acquaintance among the most valued and exalted classes of mankind. You, sir, are the only human being for whom I ever felt an awful reverence. I sincerely pray God that He may grant a long and serene evening to your life, which has been so gloriously devoted to the universal happiness of the world." ”

“ But you—the hard brain-worker, in or out of college; you, young man or young woman of character and splendid spirit—working extra hours, far into the night, perhaps, and robbing your sleep—ambitious to be somebody, and to do something worthy in the world; you, already so in love with your work, and so absorbed in it that you do not see that bright as you are making the light in the light-house, you are slowly, silently, but with fatal certainty, undermining the structure itself ”

“ Looking again at the effect on the mental work, would the daily half-hour of exercise in-doors, and the hour's constitutional out-doors, in all weathers, if sensibly arranged, interfere one whit with all the intellectual progress the girls could or should make? For, is that a rational system of intellectual progress which brings out a bright intellect on a half-developed body, and promises fine things in the future, when the body has had no training adequate to justify the belief that there will be much of any future? ”

“ And you and I, and every intelligent man and woman, know some one now who is cutting down a life of rare promise of great usefulness by just such ignorance; and in just such a battle as was fought by Horace Mann. Does it show commonsense to educate a boy or girl as to the heavenly bodies; or any other bodies; but to teach them nothing about their own bodies; and not to so educate those bodies that they shall be their willing and most helpful servants, no matter where is cast their lot in life? Which branch of their mental training approaches this in importance? ”