these words. I have also shrunk from
agitation, from clubs and from cliques, even from most respectable
associations and societies. Many people would call me an idle,
useless, and indolent man, and though I have not wasted many hours of
my life, I cannot deny the charge that I have neither fought battles,
nor helped to conquer new countries, nor joined any syndicate to roll
up a fortune. I have been a scholar, a _Stubengelehrter_, and _voila
tout_!

Much as I admired Ruskin when I saw him with his spade and
wheelbarrow, encouraging and helping his undergraduate friends to make
a new road from one village to another, I never myself took to
digging, and shovelling, and carting. Nor could I quite agree with
him, happy as I always felt in listening to him, when he said: "What
we think, or what we know, or what we believe, is in the end of
little consequence. The only thing of consequence is what we do." My
view of life has always been the very opposite! What we do, or what we
build up, has always seemed to me of little consequence. Even Nineveh
is now a mere desert of sand, and Ruskin's new road also has long
since been worn away. The only thing of consequence, to my mind, is
what we think, what we know, what we believe! To Ruskin's ears such a
sentiment was downright heresy, and I know quite well that it would be
condemned as extremely dangerous, if not downright wicked, by most
people, particularly in England. My friend, Charles Kingsley, preached
muscular Christianity, that is, he was always up and doing. Another
old friend of mine, Carlyle, preached all his life that "it was no use
talking, if one would not do." There is an old proverb in German, too,

"Die nicht mit thaten,
Die nicht mit rathen";

actually denying the right of giving advice to those who had not taken
a part in the fight.

However, though I have not been a doer, a _faiseur_, as the French
would say, I do not wish to represent myself as a mere idle drone
during the long years of my quiet life. Nor did I stand quite alone in
looking on a scholar's life--even when I was living in a garret _au
cinquieme_--as a paradise on earth. Did not Emerson write, "The
scholar is the man of the age"? Did not even Mazzini, who certainly
was constantly up and trying to do, did not even he confess that men
must die, but that the amount of truth they have discovered does not
die with them? And Carlyle? Did he ever try to get into Parliament?
Did he ever accep