and head-winds in the brain, by-ends, the sidelong eyes of vanity, the
overleaping eyes of ambition, the bleared eyes of conceit,--these are
they which thwart study and bring it to nought. Nor these only, but all
impatience, all violent eagerness, all passionate and perturbed feeling,
fill the brain with thick and hot blood, suited to the service of
desire, unfit for the uses of thought. Intellect can be served only by
the finest properties of the blood; and if there be any indocility
of soul, any impurity of purpose, any coldness or carelessness, any
prurience or crude and intemperate heat, then base spirits are sent down
from the seat of the soul to summon the sanguineous forces; and these
gather a crew after their own kind. Purity of attention, then, is the
magic that the scholar may use; and let him know, that, the purer it is,
the more temperate, tranquil, reposeful. Truth is not to be run down
with fox-hounds; she is a divinity, and divinely must he draw nigh who
will gain her presence. Go to, thou bluster-brain! Dost thou think to
learn? Learn docility first, and the manners of the skies. And thou
egotist, thinkest thou that these eyes of thine, smoky with the fires of
diseased self-love, and thronged with deceiving wishes, shall perceive
the essential and eternal? They shall see only silver and gold, houses
and lands, reputes, supremacies, fames, and, as instrumental to these,
the forms of logic and seemings of knowledge. If thou wilt discern the
truth, desire IT, not its accidents and collateral effects. Rest in the
pursuit of it, putting _simplicity of quest_ in the place of either
force or wile; and such quest cannot be unfruitful.

Let the student, then, shun an excited and spasmodic tension of brain,
and he will gain more while expending less. It is not toil, it is morbid
excitement, that kills; and morbid excitement in constant connection
with high mental endeavor is, of all modes and associations of
excitement, the most disastrous. Study as the grass grows, and your old