second-hand.

I counted seventeen "authorities" quoted, chapter and verse (and then
abandoned the enumeration), in the free talk of the other evening; and
asked myself if this reverence of the student for the master, was all
that we were ultimately to have of that vivid individual whom we had so
counted upon as Carl Parker?

I wondered, too, if, in the great opportunity that has come to you,
those simple country boys and girls of Washington were to be thus
deprived,--were to find not you but your "authorities,"--because Carl
Parker refused (even ever so modestly) to learn that Truth, denied the
aid of the free imagination, takes revenge upon her disciple, by
shutting off from him the sources of life by which a man is made free,
and reducing his mind--his rich, variable, potential mind--to the
mechanical operation of a repetitious machine.

I feel this danger for you, and for the youths you are to educate, so
poignantly that I venture to write with this frankness.

Your present imprisonment is not necessarily a life sentence; but your
satisfaction in it--your acceptance of the routine of your treadmill--is
chilling to the hopes of those who have waited upon your progress; and
it imperils your future--as well as that hope we have in the humanities
that are to be implanted in the minds of the young people you are to
instruct. We would not have you remain under the misapprehension that
Truth alone can ever serve humanity--Truth remains sterile until it is
married to Goodness. That marriage is consummated in the high flight of
the imagination, and its progeny is of beauty.