rld of civilized thought.
We are just now much bewildered with brightness in streaks, which
falls on us like the sunlight from a boy's bit of glass, and blinds
our eyes instead of showing our path. Half-educated persons seize
fragments of principles and snatch at half-truths. Crotchets infest
the brains, and hobbies career through the fields of thought.
Polyphemus is after us, a burly wretch with one eye. Better if _that_
were out.

"The remedy is, to correct our narrowness by a clear view of the wide
expanse. We must come out of our cave. We must link our pursuits to
those of humanity. Breadth and robustness given to the mental
constitution in its early training shall go far through life to save
us from partial paralysis or monstrosity.

"To insure this result, however, we must add to that fullness of
material the quality of mental equipoise or mastery, the power of
grasping and managing it all. A man is to possess, and not to be
'possessed with,' his acquisitions. He wants an intellect decisive,
incisive, and, if I might coin a word, concisive.

"The power to unify and organize must go with all right acquisition.
Knowledges must be changed to knowledge. It takes force to handle
weight. Some men seem to know more than is healthy for them. It does
not make muscle, but becomes plethoric, dropsical, adipose, or
adipocere. Better to have thought more and acquired less. Frederick W.
Robertson, in his prime, wrote,--'I will answer for it that there are
few girls of eighteen who have not read more books than I have;' and
Mrs. Browning confessed,--'I should be wiser if I had not read half as
much;' while old Hobbes, of Malmesbury, caustically remarked,--'If I
had read as much as other men I should know as little.' It may serve
as a hint to the omnivorous college student. Cardinal Mezzofanti knew,
it is said, more than a hundred languages. What came of it all? A
eulogy on one Emanuele da Ponte. He never said anything in all the
languages he spoke! What constitutes the life of an intellectual
jelly-fish? Even the brilliancy of Macaulay was almost overweighted by
the immensity of his acquisitions. The vivid glitter of details in his
memory may sometimes have dazzled his perception of a _tout ensemble_,
and for principles it was his manner to cite precedents. A multitude
of lesser lights have been almost smothered by superabundance of fuel.
A man knows Milton almost by heart, and Shakespeare too, can quote
pages of Homer, has