144 NATURE STUDY AND LIFE 



the question is too hard to answer in a day or a week or 

 a year, so much the better. If it be one worth while 

 to work at for a lifetime, so much the better. You may 

 have given a life work, the highest prize a teacher can 

 ever give a pupil. It may make the difference between 

 a life worth living and not worth living.^ 



A blank for the vegetable garden similar to that for 

 flowers may be prepared about as on the opposite page. 



1 Blessed is he who has found his work ; let him ask no other blessed- 

 ness. He has a work, a life-purpose ; he has found it, and will follow it ! 

 How, as a free-flowing channel, dug and torn by noble force through the 

 sour mud-swamp of one's existence, like an ever deepening river there, 

 it runs and flows ; — draining off the sour festering water, gradually from 

 the remotest root of the remotest grass-blade ; making, instead of a pesti- 

 lential swamp, a green fruitful meadow with its clear-flowing stream. How 

 blessed for the meadow itself, let the stream and its value be great or small ! 

 Labour is Life. From the inmost heart of the Worker rises his God-given 

 Force, the sacred celestial Life-essence breathed into him by Almighty 

 God; from his inmost heart awakens him to all nobleness — to all knowl- 

 edge, "self-knowledge" and much else, so soon as Work fitly begins. 

 Knowledge ? The knowledge that will hold good in working, cleave thou 

 to that." Properly thou hast no other knowledge but what thou has got by 

 working : the rest is yet all a hypothesis of knowledge : a thing to be argued 

 in schools, a thing floating in the clouds, in endless logic-vortices, till we 

 try it and fix it. " Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by actions alone." 



Work is of a religious nature: — work is of a brave . . . nature; which 

 is the aim of all religion to be. All work of man is as the swimmer's ; a 

 waste of ocean threatens to devour him ; if he front it not bravely it will 

 keep its word. By incessant wise defiance of it, lusty rebuke and buffet of 

 it, behold how it loyally supports him, bears him as a conqueror along. 

 "It is so," says Goethe, "with all things that man undertakes in this 

 world." Carlyle, Past and Present, p. 190. 



