e, as far as I can
manage, and that is pretty much all that I can engage for. (A laugh.)
Advices, I believe, to young men--and to all men--are very seldom much
valued. There is a great deal of advising, and very little faithful
performing. And talk that does not end in any kind of action, is
better suppressed altogether. I would not, therefore, go much into
advising; but there is one advice I must give you. It is, in fact, the
summary of all advices, and you have heard it a thousand times, I dare
say; but I must, nevertheless, let you hear it the thousand and first
time, for it is most intensely true, whether you will believe it at
present or not--namely, that above all things the interest of your own
life depends upon being diligent now, while it is called to-day,
in this place where you have come to get education. Diligent! That
includes all virtues in it that a student can have; I mean to include
in it all qualities that lead into the acquirement of real instruction
and improvement in such a place. If you will believe me, you who
are young, yours is the golden season of life. As you have heard it
called, so it verily is, the seed-time of life, in which, if you do
not sow, or if you sow tares instead of wheat, you cannot expect to
reap well afterwards, and you will arrive at indeed little; while in
the course of years, when you come to look back, and if you have
not done what you have heard from your advisers--and among many
counsellers there is wisdom--you will bitterly repent when it is too
late. The habits of study acquired at Universities are of the highest
importance in after-life. At the season when you are in young years
the whole mind is, as it were, fluid, and is capable of forming itself
into any shape that the owner of the mind pleases to order it to form
itself into. The mind is in a fluid state, but it hardens up gradually
to the consistency of rock or iron, and you cannot alter the habits of
an old man, but as he has begun he will proceed and go on to the last.
By diligence, I mean among other things--and very chiefly--honesty in
all your inquiries into what you are about. Pursue your studies in the
way your conscience calls honest. More and more endeavour to do that.
Keep, I mean to say, an accurate separation of what you have really
come to know in your own minds, and what is still unknown. Leave all
that on the hypothetical side of the barrier, as things afterwards to
be acquired, if acquired at all; a