are at home."

"The only inquirers into nature whom we care to respect, are such as
know how to describe and to represent to us the strange wonderful things
which they have seen in their proper locality, each in its own especial
element. How I should enjoy once hearing Humboldt talk!"

"A cabinet of natural curiosities we may regard like an Egyptian
burying-place, where the various plant gods and animal gods stand about
embalmed. It may be well enough for a priest-caste to busy itself with
such things in a twilight of mystery. But in general instruction, they
have no place or business; and we must beware of them all the more,
because what is nearer to us, and more valuable, may be so easily thrust
aside by them."

"A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one
single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with
rows on rows of natural objects, classified with name and form. For what
is the result of all these, except what we know as well without them,
that the human figure preeminently and peculiarly is made in the image
and likeness of God?"

"Individuals may be left to occupy themselves with whatever amuses them,
with whatever gives them pleasure, whatever they think useful; but 'the
proper study of mankind is man.'"

CHAPTER VIII

There are but few men who care to occupy themselves with the immediate
past. Either we are forcibly bound up in the present, or we lose
ourselves in the long gone-by, and seek back for what is utterly lost,
as if it were possible to summon it up again, and rehabilitate it. Even
in great and wealthy families who are under large obligations to their
ancestors, we commonly find men thinking more of their grandfathers than
their fathers.

Such reflections as these suggested themselves to our Assistant, as, on
one of those beautiful days in which the departing winter is accustomed
to imitate the spring, he had been walking up and down the great old
castle garden, and admiring the tall avenues of the lindens, and the
formal walks and flower-beds which had been laid out by Edward's father.
The trees had thriven admirably, according to the design of him who had
planted them, and now when they ought to have begun to be valued and
enjoyed, no one ever spoke of them. Hardly any one even went near them,
and the interest and the outlay was now directed to the other side, out
into the free and the open.

He remarked upon it to Charlotte on his