glowing and emotional moment they were the record!

How impossible it is ever to learn anything by being told it! How
necessary it is to pay the full price for any knowledge worth
having! The anxious father, the tearful mother, may warn the little
boy before he goes to school of the dangers that await him. He does
not understand, he does not attend, he is looking at the pattern of
the carpet, and wondering for the hundredth time whether the oddly-
shaped blue thing which appears and reappears at intervals is a
bird or a flower--yes, it is certainly meant for a bird perched on
a bough! He wishes the talk were over, he looks at the little scar
on his father's hand, and remembers that he has been told that he
cut it in a cucumber-frame when he was a boy. And then, long
afterwards perhaps, when he has made a mistake and is suffering for
it, he sees that it was THAT of which they spoke, and wonders that
they could not have explained it better.

And this is so all along! We cannot recognise the dark tower, to
which in the story Childe Roland came, by any description. We must
go there ourselves; and not till we feel the teeth of the trap
biting into us, do we see that it was exactly in such a place that
we had been warned that it would be laid.

There is an episode in that strange and beautiful book Phantastes,
by George Macdonald, which comes often to my mind. The boy is
wandering in the enchanted forest, and he is told to avoid the
house where the Daughter of the Ogre lives. His morose young guide
shows him where the paths divide, and he takes the one indicated to
him with a sense of misgiving.