8 OUTDOOR STUDIES 
battle-piece is so pathetic as Browning’s “ Gram- 
marian’s Funeral”? Do not waste your gym- 
nastics on the West Point or Annapolis stu- 
dent, whose whole life will be one of active 
exercise, but bring them into the professional 
schools and the counting-rooms. Whatever 
may be the exceptional cases, the stern truth 
remains, that the great deeds of the world can 
be more easily done by illiterate men than by 
sickly ones. Wisely said Horace Mann, “All 
through the life of a pure-minded but feeble- 
bodied man, his path is lined with memory’s 
gravestones, which mark the spots where noble 
enterprises perished, for lack of physical vigor 
to embody them in deeds.” And yet more 
finely it has been said by a younger American 
thinker, Wasson, “Intellect in a weak body is 
like gold in a spent swimmer’s pocket, — the 
richer he would be, under other circumstances, 
by so much the greater his danger now.” 
Of course, the mind has immense control 
over physical endurance, and every one knows 
that among soldiers, sailors, emigrants, and 
woodsmen, the leaders, though more delicately 
nurtured, will often endure hardship better 
than the followers, — “ because,” says Sir Philip 
Sidney, “they are supported by the great appe- 
tites of honor.” But for all these triumphs of 
nervous power a reaction lies in store, as in the 
