never been taught to use them. Cut away till your arms ache and your
head swims with the strain of measuring angles and inches and pyramids
and obelisks; Nature is working at the root while you are warring on the
branches. True, the birds will not build where your shears have passed;
and the winds will wail where they would have piped it merrily, if the
young boughs had been there to dance to their breathings. But the roots
are tough and the trunks are strong, and the sap wells surely up from
those mysterious sources where, in darkness and silence, Nature works
her wondrous transformations,--proving, through each waxing and waning
year, by bud and leaf and branch, that, thwart and mutilate and deny her
as you may, she is the same kind mother still.

As life advances, the dividing lines grow sharper and more defined. He
has got his Latin, and, in getting it, read Virgil and Horace and
Cicero, as his brothers did. But henceforth St. Augustine becomes his
Cicero; and he already begins to suspect that the best service his Homer
and Thucydides and Demosthenes have rendered him has been by enabling
him to understand St. Chrysostom. What is Herodotus to the Lives of the
Saints, or Livy to Baronius? Why should he waste his time on human
nature in Tacitus, or follow, with Guicciardini, the tortuous paths of
princes, when he can find lessons more to his taste, and wisdom more to
his purpose, in Mabillon and Pallavicini? His daily conversation is
about the interests and concerns of his order, and, as he enters upon
its duties, about the questions which those duties raise, and the
rewards which their fulfilment promises or brings. It was a great day
for him and for his friends, when he first ascended the altar in cope
and stole; but mass soon becomes a daily exercise, and, like all things
done daily, sinks into routine. A still more anxious day was it, when he
first took his seat in the confessional to absolve and to condemn, to
interpret and to enjoin, to listen to secrets which are like the lifting