But this is not all. It is the _defect_ in learning which is represented here--that same 'defect' which a graver work of this Academy reports, in connection with a proposition for the Advancement of Learning--for its advancement into the fields not yet taken up, and which turn out, upon inquiry, to be the fields of human life and practice;--it is that main defect which is represented here. 'I find a kind of science of "_words_" but none of "_things_,"' says the reporter. 'What do you read, my lord?' 'Words, words, words,' echoes the Prince of Denmark. 'I find in these antique books, in these Philosophies and Poems, a certain resplendent or lustrous mass of matter chosen to give glory either to the subtilty of disputations, or to the eloquence of discourses,' says the other and graver reporter; 'but as to the ordinary and common matter of which life consisteth, I do _not_ find it erected into an art or science, or reduced to written inquiry.' 'How _low_ soever the matter, I hope in God for _high words_,' says a speaker, who comes out of that same palace of learning on to this stage with the secret badge of the new lore on him, which is the lore of practice--a speaker not less grave, though he comes in now in the garb of this pantomime, to make sport for us with his news of learning. For 'Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light for the law of writ and the liberty.' It is the high _words_ and the low _having_ that make the incongruity. But we cannot see the vanity of those heights of words, till the lowness of the matter which they profess to abstract has been brought into contrast with them, till the particulars which they do _not_ grasp, which they can _not_ compel, have been brought into studious contrast with them. The delicate graces of those flowery summits of speech which the ideal nature, when it energises in speech, creates, must overhang in this design the rude actuality which the untrained nature in man, forgotten of art, is always producing. And it is the might of nature in this opposition, it is the force of 'matter,' it is the unconquerable cause contrasted with the vanity of the words that have not comprehended the _cause_, it is the futility of these heights of words that are not '_forms_' that do not correspond to things which must be exhibited here also. It is the force of the _law_ in nature, that must be brought into opposition here with the height of the _word_, the _ideal_ word, the _higher_, but not yet scientifically abstracted word, that seeks in vain because it has no 'grappling-hook' on the actuality, to bind it. There already are the _heights of learning_ as it is, as this school finds it, dramatically exhibited on the one hand; but this, too,--_life_ as it is,--as this school finds it, man's life as it is, unreduced to order by his philosophy, unreduced to melody by his verse, must also be dramatically exhibited on the other hand, must also be impersonated. It is life that we have