Lectures and biographical sketches

Chapter 26: THE SCHOLAR.

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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.

THE SCHOLAR.

FOR thought, and not praise,

Thought is the wages

For which I sell days,

Will gladly sell ages

And willing grow old,

Deaf and dumb, blind and cold,

Melting matter into dreams,

Panoramas which I saw,

And whatever glows or seems

Into substance, into Law.

THE sun and moon shall fall amain

Like sowers’ seeds into his brain,

There quickened to be born again.