"I took a walk the other day," so Thoreau tells us, "on Spaulding's farm. I saw the setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall. I was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable family had settled there in that part of Concord, unknown to me--to whom the sun was servant. I saw their path, their pleasuring ground through the woods in Spaulding's cranberry meadow. The pines furnished them with gables as they grew. Their house was not obvious to vision, the trees grew through it. They have sons and daughters. They are quite well. The farmer's cart path which leads directly through their hall does not in the least put them out, as the muddy bottom of the pool is sometimes seen through the reflected skies. They never heard of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their neighbor, notwithstanding I heard him whistle as he drove his team through their house. Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives. Their coat of arms is simply a lichen. It is painted on the pines and the oaks. They are of no politics. There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they were weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum as of a distant hive in May, which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They had no idle thoughts and no one without could say their work, for their industry was not in knots and excrescences embayed. Yet I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably even while I speak. It is only after a long and serious effort to recollect that I became again aware of their cohabitance. If it were not for such families as this I think I should move out of Concord." In the arts of music and painting and sculpture, one may find not only professional satisfaction, but the strength that comes from higher living and more lofty feeling. In the study of history as biography, the acquaintance with the men and women of other times, those who have felt and thought and acted and suffered to make a freer world for you and me, like inspiration may be found. History is more than its incidents. It is the movement of man. It is the movement of individual men, and it is in giving illumination to personal and racial characters that the succession of incidents has its value. The picturesque individual, the man who could not be counted with the mass, the David, the Christ, the Brutus, the Caesar, the Plato, the Alfred, the Charlemagne, the Cromwell, the Mirabeau, the Luther, the Darwin, the Helmholtz, the Goethe, the Franklin, the Hampden, the Lincoln, all these give inspiration to history. It is well that we should know them, should know them all, should know them well--an education is incomplete that is not built about a Pantheon, dedicated to the worship of great men.