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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, On an old Latin text-book. (search)
The present is so apt to disappoint our high anticipations, I do not know what would become of us poor fellows if memory did not rival hope as a flatterer, making the past as golden as the future; so that, at worst, it is only the passing moment that is poor. The thought to which my dear old Latin book has led me is simply this: that while we make children happy by teaching them the careful observation of nature,--so that our educated men need no longer be naturalists by accident, as Professor Owen said of those in England,--we yet should give to the same children another happiness still, by such first glimpses of literary pleasure as this book afforded. A race of exclusively scientific men and women would be as great an evil as would be a race trained only in what Sydney Smith calls the safe and elegant imbecility of classical learning. We can spare the Louvre and the Vatican, we can spare Paestum and the Pyramids, as easily as we can spare the purely literary culture from the w