selves or
others, as to understand, through the more generous and active
sympathies of our nature, how the information which we possess may be
best applied to useful purposes. This we shall not well know, if the
head be allowed or encouraged to leave the heart behind. If we forget
society it will forget us, and, through this estrangement, a sympathetic
knowledge of human nature may be lost. Thus, in the haunts of seclusion
and solitary thought our acquirements may only prove availing to
ourselves as matters of self-gratification. The benevolent affections,
which ought not merely to be allowed, but taught to expand, may thus not
only be permitted but encouraged to contract, and the exercise of that
studious ingenuity, which perhaps leads the world to admire the
achievements of learning, thus deceive us into a state of existence
little better than cold selfishness itself. Sir Isaac Newton, who soared
so high and travelled so far on the wing of abstract thought, gathering
light from the stars that he might convey it in intelligible shape to
the world, seems to have thought, high as the employment was, that it
was not good, either for the heart or mind of man, to be always away
from that intercourse with humanity and its affairs which is calculated
to awaken and sustain the sympathies of life; and therefore turned to
the contemplation of Him who was _meek and lowly_. And no countenance
has been afforded to monks and hermits who retired from the world,
though it even was to spend their lives in meditation and prayer; for
Heaven had warned man, at an early date, not to withhold the
compassionate feelings of the heart, and the helping-hand, from any in
whom he recognised the attributes of a common nature, saying to him,
'See that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh.'

"My last year's attendance at the College Philosophical Classes was at
St Andrews. I had a craving to acquaint myself with a city noted in
story, and I could not, under the canopy of my native sky, have planted
the step among scenes more closely interwoven with past national
transactions, or fraught with more interesting associations. In
attending the Natural Philosophy Class, not being proficient in
mathematic lore, I derived less advantage than had otherwise been the
case with me. Yet I did not sit wholly in the shade, notwithstanding
that the light which shone upon me did not come from that which Campbell
says yielded 'the lyre of Heaven another string.