Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/224

220 its own season? Yet, while these leaves are growing for the blossom's sake, and the life of the tree is directed thither with special and urgent emphasis, the different between branch and blossom, leaf and petal, is getting more and more. By and by the two cannot comprehend each other; the acorn has forgotten the leaf which reared it, and thinks itself of another kin. Grotius, who speaks a host of languages, talking with the learned of all countries, and of every age, has forgot his mother tongue, and speech is at end with her that bore him. The son, accomplished with many a science, many an art, ceases to understand the simple consciousness of his father and mother. They are proud of him—that he has outgrown them; he ashamed of them when they visit him amid his scholarly company. To them he is a philosopher; they only clowns in his eyes. He learns to neglect, perhaps to despise them, and forgets his obligation and his debt. Yet by their rudeness is it that he is refined. His science and literary skill are purchased by their ignorance and uncouthness of manner and of speech. Had the educational cost been equally divided, all had still continued on a level; he lived known no Latin, but the whole family might have spoken good English. For all the difference which education has made betwixt him and his kinsfolk he is a debtor.

In New England you sometimes <see extremes of social condition brought together. The blue-frocked father, well advanced, but hale as an October morning, jostles into Boston in a milk-cart, his red-cheeked grand-daughter beside him, also coming for some useful daily work, while the youngest son, cultured at the cost of that grand-daughter's sire and by that father' toil, is already a famous man; perhaps also a proud one, eloquent at the bar, or powerful in the pulpit, or mighty in the senate. The family was not rich enough to educate all the children after this costly sort; one becomes famous, the rest are neglected, obscure, and perhaps ignorant; the cultivated son has little sympathy with them. So the men that built up the cathedrals of Strasbourg and Milan slept in mean hutches of mud and straw, dirty, cold, and wet; the finished tower looks proudly down upon the lowly thatch, all heedless of the cost at which itself arose. It is plain that this man owes for his education; it is plain, whom he owes.