1pFFjZK

TIIOREAU 249
record his day's experience
will be more musical and true
than his freest but idle fancy could have furnished. Surely
the writer is to address a world of laborers, and such therefore
must be his own discipline. He will not idly dance at
rk who has wood to cut and cord before nightfall in
the short days of winter; but every stroke will be husbanded,
and ring soberly through the wood; and so will the strokes
of that scholar's pen, which at evening record the story of
the day, ring soberly, yet cheerily, on the ear of the reader,
long after the echoes of his axe have died away. The scholar
may be sure that he writes the tougher truth for the calluses
on his palms. They give firmness to the sentence. Indeejj,
the mind never makes a great and successful effort,
without
a corresponding energy of the body. We are often struck
by the force and precision of style to which hard-working
men, unpractised in writing, easily attain when required to
make the effort. As if
plainness and vigor and sincerity, the
ornaments of style, were better learned on the farm and in
the workshop than in the schools. The sentences written by
such rude hands are nervous and tough, like hardened thongs,
the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine. As for the
-
of expression, a great thought
is never found in a
mean dlCSS; but though it proceed from the lips
of the
Wolofs, 4 the nine Muses and the three (1 races will have conspired
to clothe it in fit phrase. IN education has always
liberal, and itimplied
wit can endow a college. The
world, which the < , illl
I'.rauty. ha- been made' such
by being gradually dive-ted of every ornament which was not
fitted to endure. Tin- Sibyl,
"
-peaking with inspired mouth,
smilelc-s , inornate, and unpcrfumed, pierce- through 060
by the- power of the god." The scholar might frequently
emulate the propriety and emphasis of the farmer's
call i
MI, and confess that if that were written it would