rare, the exquisite exclusively and to overlook the common. We are
stuffed with abstract conceptions, and glib with verbalities and
verbosities; and in the culture of these higher functions the
peculiar sources of joy connected with our simpler functions often
dry up, and we grow stone-blind and insensible to life's more
elementary and general goods and joys."

I wish I might go home from school one evening by way of the top of
Mt. Vesuvius, another by way of Mt. Rigi, and, another, by way of
Lauterbrunnen. Then the next evening I should like to spend an hour
or two along the borders of Yellowstone Canyon, and the next, watch
an eruption or two of Old Faithful geyser. Then, on still another
evening, I'd like to ride for two hours on top of a bus in London.
I'd like to have these experiences as an antidote for emptiness. It
would prepare me far better for to-morrow work than pondering
Johnny's defections, or his grades, whether high or low, or marking
silly papers with marks that are still sillier. I like Walt Whitman
because he was such a sublime loafer. His loafing gave him time to
grow big inside, and so, he had big elemental thoughts that were good
for him and good for me when I think them over after him.

If I should ever get a position in a normal school I'd want to give a
course in William J. Locke's "The Beloved Vagabond," so as to give
the young folks a conception of big elemental teaching. If I were
giving a course in ethics, I'd probably select another book, but, in
pedagogy, I'd certainly include that one. I'd lose some students, to
be sure, for some of them would be shocked; but a person who is not
big enough to profit by reading that book never ought to teach
school--I mean for the school's sake. If we could only lose the
consciousness of the fact that we are schoolmasters for a few hours