This family are acting out their life's love just as
thoroughly, though not as understandingly, as the other. They do not
desire education from love for it, but because it would give them a
certain standing in society, and not having the means of indulging
vanity in this direction, they turn to dress and idleness, as easier
signs of what is vulgarly called gentility. Still these persons would
deem you unjust and unkind if you told them they were living in
ignorance because they had no true love for education; and they would
hardly deem you sane should you tell them that the Character of every
human being is the sum and continent and expression of all that he best
loves.
We cannot truly love anything that we do not understand,--anything that
has not a distinct existence in our thoughts and imaginations; and all
of Character that we love and can clearly image to ourselves we can
bring out into life. The Affections are the children of the Will, and
if the Will be determined and steadfast, there is no limit but the
finiteness of humanity to the progress in whatever is undertaken. When
we love ardently, all effort seems light compared with the good we
expect to derive from the possession of that which we love. If we become
weary and faint by the way, it is because we lack intensity of love.
In reading the lives of distinguished men, we find that, in the pursuit
of whatever has raised them above the mass of men, they knew no
discouragement, acknowledged no impossibility.
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