AT A LADDER'S FOOT.

BUT WHY WRITE IT DOWN?

FRIEND, you remember one midsummer day, how you sat among the hills on the heather bank, where the stream, brown with yesterday's rain, and lightening into gold across his stair, came talking past you; and you watched the mountain spring up beyond the laps and folds of woodland on his knees into a heaven of deep blue behind the shining cloud-fleece. And you remember the thought that came on you, "If I could but keep it-this gladness of the time; keep by me the divini gloria ruris, not let it pass and be as if it had never been". If only one could do with the golden hour as we do with the duller gold,-put it by to be one's own, to bear interest; could one harvest Vision as men capitalise the winnings of Energy, and live henceforward on the fruit! Alas, what the Roman said of life, that "we may use, but we may not own," is true of the moments when we live the most.

So you thought that summer morning. And so I have often thought, in no holiday season, but on a working day among my scholars, when some incident of classroom or study or chapel has touched the heart with a sense of beauty in the life which has fallen to my lot. If I could but harvest the good, which hours of this life have let rest in my bosom for the moment; harvest it, and make the store be bread to strengthen man's heart in all after hours! Well, can I not? You, my friend, are poet, and there is a rippling lyric of yours, in which the talk of that moorland river, and the shine on the cloud-bosoms, live on for me at least. You carried and stored the harvest of a quiet eye that morning. In such staider rhythms as I command, let me record a happy life-day passed in the school, and garner, while I may, my harvest of a master's eye, the experience which has not been nought, the vision which, perhaps, is more. While I may. For since I passed the reins into that younger hand, and came away here to sit out the autumn evening among the dear hills whose breath is birthplace air to me, memory begins already to mellow the landscape of the working days, and in the aerial perspective lines and hues grow doubtful.

But let me record it, as I might in letters to you, dear friend of mine, on the bank of Isis first,

and along all life's river afterwards,-with their frankness, I mean, though not in their form; letters, wiser, perhaps, but not unlike those in which we gave one the other "good cheer," and echoed old academic watchwords, from our sundered fields of practice in the first decade of our tasks. If I may think, all the time, that I am talking with my class-mate, and this paper is the birthday-sheet on which I tell him how I find the years between, perhaps I shall escape one at least of two terrors which are daunting me. For one is that I may be led to write a book on Education. I know that such books have to be read, and therefore some one must write them. But we have each one his special dread, of some trial beyond what he is able to bear, and just as one man hopes to pass through life and not be mayor of his native town; and another, who does not like snakes, trusts that no duty will give him a call to India; so I have always desired that it may never be my manifest duty to compose an educational treatise. Let me succeed in steering my bark "outside this surf and surge," and yet in 'scaping the whirlpool of System let me not run blind upon the counter-rock of Personality and write my own biography. Yet how evade this? For how can one tell of one's experiences and not be autobiographer, which is a kind of egotist?

Ah! but my experiences! If they were, like an ancient king's, of "wars and ways and sayings," of schools reformed or restored or magnified, of the methods I had discovered or the pupils I had instructed to greatness, then I might have the judgment to make, whether oblivion be a worse evil than egotism, which presently is oblivion too. But here are no such matters. The experience I shall relate is not of what I have done, but of what I have failed to do; the duty discerned, not achieved. Here will be less experience than vision; the vision of conquests, but of conquests which will be another man's. Will there be a line of this which is more a boast than a sigh?

But no one, you say, will be the wiser; our sons who seem never to profit by their fathers' experiences, even of fact which is hard and of suffering which is sharp, will be little helped by their fathers' visions. They only faintly credit us about the storm which blew down the chimneystack, and you ask them to take in your sunsets and auroras!

Well, I am not sure that vision is not more communicable, instead of less, than experience. For there really is no language for the conveyance of an ache or a pang or a rapture, while there are a few halting expressions for a landscape or even a cloud picture. But to say that no one learns by