listen as well as to speak. It is a life for any one who has found
that there is a world of tender, wistful, delicate emotions,
subdued and soft impressions, in which it is peace to live; for one
who has learned, however dimly, that wise and faithful love, quiet
and patient hope, are the bread by which the spirit is nourished--
that religion is not an intellectual or even an ecclesiastical
thing, but a far-off and remote vision of the soul.

I know well the thoughts and hopes that I should desire to speak;
but they are evasive, subtle things, and too often, like shy birds,
will hardly let you approach them. But I would add that life has
not been for me a dreamy thing, lived in soft fantastic reveries;
indeed, it has been far the reverse. I have practised activity, I
have mixed much with my fellows; I have taught, worked, organized,
directed. I have watched men and boys; I have found infinite food
for mirth, for interest, and even for grief. But I have grown to
feel that the ambitions which we preach and the successes for which
we prepare are very often nothing but a missing of the simple road,
a troubled wandering among thorny by-paths and dark mountains. I
have grown to believe that the one thing worth aiming at is
simplicity of heart and life; that one's relations with others
should be direct and not diplomatic; that power leaves a bitter
taste in the mouth; that meanness, and hardness, and coldness are
the unforgivable sins; that conventionality is the mother of
dreariness; that pleasure exists not in virtue of material
conditions, but in the joyful heart; that the world is a very
interesting and beautiful place; that congenial labour is the
secret of happiness; and many other things which seem, as I write
them down, to be dull and trite commonplaces, but are for me the
bright jewels which I have found beside the way.