Moreover, an overmastering passion is the secret of all eminence in scholarship. Each autumn the golden gates of learning swing wide to welcome the thousands who enter our colleges and universities. If it were possible for each young student to sit down and speak with the library and laboratory as with a familiar friend, we would hear wisdom's voice uttering one report: "I love them that love me." None of those forms of mental wealth called art or science or literature, enters the mind unasked or stays unurged. All the shelves are heavy with mental treasure, but only the eager mind may harvest it. Beauty sleeps in all the quarries, but only the eager chisel wakens it. Wealth is in every crack and crevice of the soil, but nature forbids the sluggard to mine it. Those forms of paradise called fame, position, influence, stand with gates open by day and night, but the cherubim with flaming swords wave back all idle youth. When the Grecian king set forth upon his expedition he stayed his golden chariot at the market-place. Lifting up his voice he forbade any man's body to enter his chariot whose heart remained behind. Thus the mind is a chariot that sweeps no unwilling student upward toward those heights where wisdom and happiness dwell. To-day our young men and women stand in the midst of arts, vast, beautiful and useful; they are surrounded by all the facts of man's marvelous history; they breathe an atmosphere charged with refinement. But the youth who hates his books might as well be the poor savage lying on the banks of the Niger, whose soul sits in silence and starves to death in a silent dungeon. Should a kind heaven give us the power to select some charmed gift to be dropped down upon our youth, parents and teachers could ask nothing better than that each young heart should storm the gates of learning with such enthusiasm as belonged to Milton or Epictetus. The Roman slave had one leg broken and twisted by a cruel master, but in his enthusiasm for knowledge he used the dim light of his cell for copying the thoughts of great authors, and lay awake at night reflecting upon the problems of life and death with man's mysterious nature, and so made himself immortal by his devotion to the truth. For the student, enthusiasm is indeed "a god within." Ignorance is want of mental animation. The scientist tells us the Patagonians sleep eighteen hours each day, with a tendency to doze through the other six. Their minds are unable to make any kind of movement, and the chief once told Sir John Lubbock that he would love to talk were it not that large ideas made him very sleepy.