Much as I admired Ruskin when I saw him with his spade and wheelbarrow, encouraging and helping his undergraduate friends to make a new road from one village to another, I never myself took to digging, and shovelling, and carting. Nor could I quite agree with him, happy as I always felt in listening to him, when he said: “What we think, or what we know, or what we believe, is in the end of little consequence. The only thing of consequence is what we do.” My view of life has always been the very opposite! What we do, or what we build up, has always seemed to me of little consequence. Even Nineveh is now a mere desert of sand, and Ruskin’s new road also has long since been worn away. The only thing of consequence, to my mind, is what we think, what we know, what we believe! To Ruskin’s ears such a sentiment was downright heresy, and I know quite well that it would be condemned as extremely dangerous, if not downright wicked, by most people, particularly in England. My friend, Charles Kingsley, preached muscular Christianity, that is, he was always up and doing. Another old friend of mine, Carlyle, preached all his life that “it was no use talking, if one would not do.” There is an old proverb in German, too, “Die nicht mit thaten, Die nicht mit rathen”; actually denying the right of giving advice to those who had not taken a part in the fight. However, though I have not been a doer, a _faiseur_, as the French would say, I do not wish to represent myself as a mere idle drone during the long years of my quiet life. Nor did I stand quite alone in looking on a scholar’s life—even when I was living in a garret _au cinquième_—as a paradise on earth. Did not Emerson write, “The scholar is the man of the age”? Did not even Mazzini, who certainly was constantly up and trying to do, did not even he confess that men must die, but that the amount of truth they have discovered does not die with them? And Carlyle? Did he ever try to get into Parliament? Did he ever accept directorates? Did he join either the Chartists or the Special Constables in Trafalgar Square? As in a concert you want listeners as well as performers, so in public life, those who look on are quite as essential as those who shout and deal heavy blows.