And yet again, when some ardent lad has passed through school and college, foregoing all the sports of his age, and receiving prizes and honors, till he stands a first-class man of Oxford or Cambridge, and his father’s sacrifices and his mother’s yearnings and all his own gallant and self-denying labors seem on the point of reaping their reward, how often does it come to pass that with the close of the struggle come the reaction, the decline, the hasty journey abroad, the hoping against hope, and then—death! Thirdly. There is the waste of Eyesight in education. It is understood, when we see a young man with the “light of the body” dimmed behind glass spectacles, that he has hurt his eyes by poring over books. A farmer, a sportsman, or a soldier, purblind at twenty-five or thirty, is a rare thing to see. It is the scholar, lawyer, or divine who has paid the penalty of seeing God’s beautiful world evermore through those abominable bits of glass. And for what mighty advantage? Again I say, it ought to be something excessively valuable for which a man will exchange the apple of his eye. Suppose Bell Taylor were to ask a blind gentleman a fee of a thousand pounds to give him his sight as he has given it to more than one born blind. The blind man, if he possessed the money, would doubtless pour it out like water to obtain the priceless boon of vision. And _this_ is the gift which our boys exchange for a moderate acquaintance with the Greek language, to be forgotten in a few years after they leave school! Half the vast Teutonic nation beholds the universe from behind spectacles; owing, no doubt, to their vaunted compulsory education, aided by their truculent black types. And we open-eyed Britons are exhorted, forsooth, to admire and follow in the steps of those barnacled Prussians! Such are three of the most obvious losses to be placed in the scale against the gains of Knowledge,—the loss to many of bodily health; to all of the unshackled freedom of childhood; and to not a few of perfect eyesight. But we cannot suppose it was to any of these things Solomon alluded when he linked Knowledge and Sorrow in one category. It is not likely that those studies of his, about the hyssop and the cedar, injured his health; nor that the royal sage sat on his famous ivory throne to receive the Queen of Sheba in a pair of spectacles. As to the loss of the pleasures of childhood, his well-known opinion of the value of the Rod (to the wisdom of which the subsequent conduct of his son Rehoboam afforded an illustration) makes it probable that he would have approved of the torture of infants through the instrumentality of lessons. Knowledge and Sorrow had, no doubt, some other connection in his mind; and that connection we have still to mark.