In speaking of the trials of the country parson’s life in my last essay, I left much unsaid that needed saying. I rather shrank from dealing with matters which are outside the range of my own experience, and confined myself to such illustrations of the positions maintained as my own personal knowledge could supply. There are, however, some phases of the country parson’s life which I am perhaps less competent to dwell on than others who have been all their lives _rustics_, and because I would not willingly wound the feelings of those whom I honour and respect, therefore I am inclined to hang back and hold my peace and say nothing. Why does not somebody else step in and take up the thread where I dropped it, deliver his testimony, and give us the record of his larger experience? Or shall we ask another question? How is it that people who have much to tell, so often have no faculty of setting it down in words and sentences? We boast of our advance in education, and yet what has it done for us--what is it doing for us? I mean my son to be _really_ educated. I mean him to be able to sit down to an organ and satisfy his soul as he dreams his dreams or sends forth his wail of aspiration, or sobs out his grief and penitence, or laughs forth his ecstasy of rapture, now in a passion of melody, now in subtle tangle of mysterious fugue, now in awful billows of harmony, making full concert to the angelic symphony. I mean him to be able to catch the laugh of the child, or the scowl of the ruffian, or the smirk of the swindler, or the wonder and triumph and joy and pride of the maiden who has just listened to her lover’s tale, or the sombre beauty of the aged when the twilight deepens and they are thinking of the dawn. I mean my son to have the power to catch these things, and to _hold_ them and show them to me, saying, “Look! there they are for you and me to dwell on when we will.” Then, and not till then, will that lad of promise have begun to be educated. But we--or such as I--what upstarts we are! We that talk badly, write worse, and fumble and bungle miserably with that beggarly vehicle of communication between man and man which we call language--that wretched _calculus_ which serves just a very little way towards helping us to hold converse with men as foolish as ourselves, but leaves us helpless to make the throstle feel how much we love him, and which we fling aside as a mere burden when our hearts are dying in us with what we call our loneliness or our despair. Educated! Who is educated? Certainly not the man who, having his memory full of a vast assemblage of odds and ends, can no more bring them out and produce them in an intelligible shape than I can produce on canvas the face of yonder old beldame with the square jaw and the bushy brows and the blazing eyes, and that burlesque of a bonnet, square and round and oval at one and the same moment, and no more capable of being described in words than of being written out in musical notation.