Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/267

Rh given him keen delight in his youth and travels. He dates this change from just after his thirtieth year, when he became absorbed in scientific pursuits as his profession. Something, no doubt, and perhaps much, is to be set down to the effect of his ill-health, which left him with diminished energies for any recreation; his strength was exhausted in his few hours of work. He was himself so convinced that his life had been narrowed in these ways, that he says if he had it to live over he would have planned to give a certain time habitually to poetry.

It would be too much to say that the failure of Darwin to appropriate the humane elements in his university education accounts in any perceptible degree for these defects. In culture, as in science, the self-making power of the man counts heavily; and there is such inefficiency in those whose duty it is to give youth a liberal education from classical sources, there are such wrong methods and unintelligent aims in the universities, that it might easily prove to be the case that a student with the most cordial temperament toward the humanities would profit only imperfectly by his residence at seats of learning. In spite of these reservations