Lectures and biographical sketches

Chapter 10: CHARACTER.

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About This Book

A compact volume of lectures and sketches that interweaves philosophical essays with concise portraits of notable contemporaries. Topics range from dreams, character, and education to ethics, literary life, and historical reflection, presented in a dense, aphoristic prose that mixes moral inquiry with cultural observation. Several pieces consider the disposition and duties of intellectual life, while the biographical sketches illuminate individual temperaments and habits of mind, together offering a mosaic of ideas about personal integrity, artistic vocation, and the social forces that shape thought and character.

CHARACTER.

SHUN passion, fold the hands of thrift,

Sit still, and Truth is near;

Suddenly it will uplift

Your eyelids to the sphere:

Wait a little, you shall see

The portraiture of things to be.

FOR what need I of book or priest

Or Sibyl from the mummied East

When every star is Bethlehem Star,—

I count as many as there are

Cinquefoils or violets in the grass,

So many saints and saviours,

So many high behaviours.