We not unfrequently see a very poor family having an intense desire for education, and their poverty, instead of putting its acquisition out of their reach, seems only to stimulate their ardor of pursuit. One half of their time will perhaps be spent in the most arduous labor in order to procure the means of obtaining the aid of books and teachers to enrich the other half; and no self-denial in dress or physical indulgence seems painful, when weighed against the pleasure of increasing the means of education. Here is genuine love of learning, and the result of its efforts will prove the truth of the old adage, "Where there is a will there is a way." This family is acting out its life's love understandingly and with fixed purpose. Perhaps in the very next house to this is another family of not nearly so small property. They too profess great love of and desire for education; but there is no corresponding effort. They must dress with a certain degree of gentility, and they must not make an effort to earn money by any means that would seem to lower their standing in society; and, moreover, they are indolent, and the effort that the denial of physical indulgences requires seems insupportable to them. The parents of this family will often be heard lamenting that their children cannot have an education; and if one should venture to indicate the possibility of their obtaining one for themselves as their neighbors are doing, they will reply that their children have not strength to struggle along in that way, or that they are too proud to get an education in a way that would seem to place them in point of social rank below any of their fellow-students. This family are acting out their life's love just as thoroughly, though not as understandingly, as the other. They do not desire education from love for it, but because it would give them a certain standing in society, and not having the means of indulging vanity in this direction, they turn to dress and idleness, as easier signs of what is vulgarly called gentility. Still these persons would deem you unjust and unkind if you told them they were living in ignorance because they had no true love for education; and they would hardly deem you sane should you tell them that the Character of every human being is the sum and continent and expression of all that he best loves. We cannot truly love anything that we do not understand,--anything that has not a distinct existence in our thoughts and imaginations; and all of Character that we love and can clearly image to ourselves we can bring out into life. The Affections are the children of the Will, and if the Will be determined and steadfast, there is no limit but the finiteness of humanity to the progress in whatever is undertaken. When we love ardently, all effort seems light compared with the good we expect to derive from the possession of that which we love. If we become weary and faint by the way, it is because we lack intensity of love.