Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 71, No. 436, February 1852Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 71, No. 436, February 1852
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
From this reverie Leonard did not seek to rouse himself, till the
bell at the garden gate rang loud and shrill; and then starting up
and hurrying into the hall, his hand was grasped in Harley's.
[57]
At home--"In the serene regions
Where dwell the pure forms."
CHAPTER XVI.
A full and happy hour passed away in Harley's questions and
Leonard's answers; the dialogue that naturally ensued between the
two, on the first interview after an absence of years so eventful to
the younger man.
The history of Leonard during this interval was almost solely
internal, the struggle of intellect with its own difficulties, the
wanderings of imagination through its own adventurous worlds.
The first aim of Norreys, in preparing the mind of his pupil for
its vocation, had been to establish the equilibrium of its powers,
to calm into harmony the elements rudely shaken by the trials and
passions of the old hard outer life.
The theory of Norreys was briefly this. The education of a superior
human being is but the development of ideas in one for the benefit
of others. To this end, attention should be directed--1st, To the
value of the ideas collected; 2dly, To their discipline; 3dly, To
their expression. For the first, acquirement is necessary; for
the second, discipline; for the third, art. The first comprehends
knowledge, purely intellectual, whether derived from observation,
memory, reflection, books or men, Aristotle or Fleet Street. The
second demands _training_, not only intellectual, but moral; the
purifying and exaltation of motives; the formation of habits; in
which method is but a part of a divine and harmonious symmetry--a
union of intellect and conscience. Ideas of value, stored by the
first process; marshalled into force, and placed under guidance, by
the second; it is the result of the third, to place them before the
world in the most attractive or commanding form. This may be done by
actions no less than words; but the adaptation of means to end, the
passage of ideas from the brain of one man into the lives and souls
of all, no less in action than in books, requires study. Action has
its art as well as literature. Here Norreys had but to deal with
the calling of the scholar, the formation of the writer, and so to
guide the perceptions towards those varieties in the sublime and
beautiful, the just combination of which is at once CREATION. Man
himself is but a combination of elements. He who combines in nature,
creates in art.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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