The work of sages has been to rule the thinking of the race. They
receive the inspired ideas and spend their lives in teaching them to
others: in setting up intellectual vibrations throughout the world.

Some day, I hope Sargent will paint a March of Sages, as gloriously as
he has painted the panels of the Prophets. Then we shall gaze upon the
train of heavy-browed, noble-eyed, wise, gentle-mannered men, who have
been the enduring teachers of the race,--thinkers, leaders, seers.
Confucius, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, the mediaeval
philosophers, the Egyptian, Persian, and Arabian thinkers, Roger Bacon,
Thomas Aquinas, Eckhart, William of Occam, Bede, Thomas à Kempis,
Francis Bacon, Kant, John Stuart Mill, Spencer,--with what dignity the
processional moves down the years! The sum of human knowledge is vast;
but how much more vast seem the achievements of each of these men, when
we realize how few his years, and how many the obstacles and impediments
of his all too short career! There is ever a pathos in the life of
the wise.

By thinking, we pass from the gossip of the neighborhood into the
conversation of the years. We do not know what Alcibiades said to his
man-servant about the care of his clothes, baths, perfumes,--nor what
his man-servant retailed to other retainers of the eccentricities and
vanities of his master. But we know what Pericles and Plato said to the
race. Here is the advantage of a thinking mind--that at any moment one
may enter into eternal subjects of thought, and have converse with those
who of all times have been the most profound.

Nothing teases the soul like the thought of the unfinished, the
imperfect, the incomplete. And yet, when we have thought and planned a
really great and abiding work, whether we ever finish it or not--for