Yet such is the better specimen of the fruit of that ambitious system which has of late years been making way among us: for its result on ordinary minds, and on the common run of students, is less satisfactory still; they leave their place of education simply dissipated and relaxed by the multiplicity of subjects, which they have never really mastered, and so shallow as not even to know their shallowness. How much better, I say, it is for the active and thoughtful intellect, where such is to be found, to eschew the college and the university altogether, than to submit to a drudgery so ignoble, a mockery so contumelious! How much more profitable for the independent mind, after the mere rudiments of education, to range through a library at random, taking down books as they meet him, and pursuing the trains of thought which his mother wit suggests! How much healthier to wander into the fields, and there with the exiled prince to find "tongues in the trees, books in the running brooks!" How much more genuine an education is that of the poor boy in the poem[19]--a poem, whether in conception or execution, one of the most touching in our language--who, not in the wide world, but ranging day by day around his widowed mother's home, "a dextrous gleaner" in a narrow field and with only such slender outfit as the village school and books a few Supplied, contrived from the beach, and the quay, and the fisher's boat, and the inn's fireside, and the tradesman's shop, and the shepherd's walk, and the smuggler's hut, and the mossy moor, and the screaming gulls, and the restless waves, to fashion for himself a philosophy and a poetry of his own! But in a large subject, I am exceeding my necessary limits. Gentlemen, I must conclude abruptly; and postpone any summing up of my argument, should that be necessary, to another day. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 11: Discourse VI in "The Idea of a University," 1852.] [Footnote 12: Prima-facie: based on one's first impression.] [Footnote 13: Four-square.] [Footnote 14: To be moved by nothing.] [Footnote 15: Happy is he who has come to know the sequences of things, and is thus above all fear and the dread march of fate and the roar of greedy Acheron.] [Footnote 16: It rules or it serves.] [Footnote 17: Brute force without intelligence falls by its own weight.] [Footnote 18: Genius loci: spirit of the place.] [Footnote 19: Crabbe's _Tales of the Hall_. This poem, let me say, I read on its first publication, above thirty years ago, with extreme delight, and have never lost my love of it; and on taking it up lately, found I was even more touched by it than heretofore. A work which can please in youth and age, seems to fulfil (in logical language) the _accidental definition_ of a classic. (A further course of twenty years has passed, and I bear the same witness in favour of this poem.)] LITERATURE AND SCIENCE[20] MATTHEW ARNOLD