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Chapter 10: a chapter about myself
If I may sum up in one term the leading bent of my life, I will simply call myself a student.
Dr. Howe used to say of me: ‘
Mrs. Howe is not a great reader, but she always studies.’
Albeit my intellectual pursuits have always been such as to task my mind, I cannot boast that I have acquired much in the way of technical erudition.
I have only drawn from history and philosophy some understanding of human life, some lessons in the value of thought for thought's sake, and, above all, a sense of the dignity of character above every other dignity.
Goethe chose well for his motto the words:—
‘Die Zeit ist mein Vormachtniss, mein
Acker ist die Zeit.’
‘Time is my inheritance; time is my estate.’
But I may choose this for mine:—
‘I have followed the great masters with my heart.’
The first writer of importance with whom I made acquaintance after leaving school was
Gibbon, whose ‘Decline and Fall of the
Roman ’