Culture and the State 43 



our speech may be, we are dealing now with, something 

 much more than a figure. The ways of human culture 

 are the ways of nature with the roses. The youthful 

 mind appropriates, assimilates in strangest but most posi- 

 tive fashion ; does not borrow, does not much accumulate 

 fact or statement; actually assimilates and grows! You 

 place before young people, in the atmosphere just de- 

 scribed, literature, history, science, art, labor, any skill 

 of brain or hand; you show these things; you awaken 

 appetite, interest, and away they go! The intellectual 

 life takes care of itself, just as does the life of the plant 

 The far fields of history, for example, widen till the lad 

 can see naught else. Himself wins Marathon and Sala- 

 mis. 'Tis he that walks at sunrise by the creeping Nile 

 and sees the earliest ray pick out the golden glory re- 

 corded long ago upon the pyramid's sloping sides. He 

 knows the secret of that sad stone face they call the 

 Sphinx, watching for the morning; he walks with Peri- 

 cles among the marble glories of that priceless Athenian 

 hill; he traces, with busy finger, wall succeeding wall 

 that vainly shut in the majesty of the seven hills ; he sees 

 long roads that run to the ends of the earth ; he, reading 

 the opening pages of pictorial Gibbon, watches the 

 marching files of the imperial guard as with purple ban- 

 ners they bear to all the world the peace of Rome. 



You show literature to the careless boys ; some of them 

 will plunge into her fascinating tomes ; philosophy, poet- 

 ry, story, the languages of man. Here is a dream-world, 

 un vexed by noise or tumult or war's alarm, an exhibit 

 of real culture, not kultur. The student learns how bar- 

 barism, alike of pagan and Christian centuries, sweeps 



