Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/95

Rh teach youth or anybody truths. They can only learn them after their own fashion, and when they get ready. I do not mean by this to condemn our system of education, but to show what it amounts to. A hundred boys at college are drilled in physics, metaphysics, languages, etc. There may be one or two in each hundred, prematurely old, perchance, who approach the subject from a similar point of view to their teachers', but as for the rest and the most promising, it is like agricultural chemistry to so many Indians. They get a valuable drilling, it may be, but they do not learn what you profess to teach. They at most only learn where the arsenal is, in case they should ever want to use any of its weapons. The young men, being young, necessarily listen to the lecturer on history, just as they do to the singing of a bird. They expect to be affected by something he may say. It is a kind of poetic pabulum and imagery that they get. Nothing comes quite amiss to their mill.

Jan. 1, 1841. All, men and women, woo one. There is a fragrance in their breath.

And if now they hate, I muse as in sombre, cloudy weather, not despairing of the absent ray.