part, he marries manners. When we think what keys they are, and to what
secrets; what high lessons, and inspiring tokens of character they
convey, and what divination is required in us for the reading of this
fine telegraph,--we see what range the subject has, and what relations
to convenience, power, and beauty."

In Emerson's early days there was nothing in our schools and colleges
which at all corresponded to what we now know too much about under the
name of athletic sports. The elaborate organization of these sports is a
development of the last thirty years in our schools and colleges; but I
find in Emerson the true reason for the athletic cult, given a
generation before it existed among us. Your boy "hates the grammar and
Gradus, and loves guns, fishing-rods, horses, and boats. Well, the boy
is right, and you are not fit to direct his bringing-up, if your theory
leaves out his gymnastic training.... Football, cricket, archery,
swimming, skating, climbing, fencing, riding are lessons in the art of
power, which it is his main business to learn.... Besides, the gun,
fishing-rod, boat, and horse constitute, among all who use them, secret
free-masonries." We shall never find a completer justification of
athletic sports than that.

In his memorable address on The American Scholar, which was given at
Cambridge in 1837, Emerson pointed out that the function of the scholar
should include creative action, or, as we call it in these days,
research, or the search for new truth. He says: "The soul active ...
utters truth, or creates.... In its essence it is progressive. The book,
the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with
some past utterance of genius.... They look backward and not forward.
But genius looks forward. Man hopes: genius creates. Whatever talents
may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not