which is man's alone, of the life he shall live, and finds out
first or last that the art in living is not only to be genuine
and one's own master, but also to learn mastery in perception and
preference. Your true woodsman needs not to follow the dusty
highway through the forest nor search for any path, but goes
straight from glade to glade as if upon an open way, having some
privy understanding with the taller trees, some compass in his
senses. So there is the subtle craft in finding ways for the
mind, too. Keep but your eyes alert and your ears quick, as you
move among men and among books, and you shall find yourself
possessed at last of a new sense, the sense of the pathfinder.
Have you never marked the eyes of a man who has seen the world he
has lived in: the eyes of the sea-captain, who has watched his
life through the changes of the heavens; the eyes of the
huntsman, nature's gossip and familiar; the eyes of the man of
affairs, accustomed to command in moments of exigency? You are at
once aware that they are eyes which can see. There is something
in them that you do not find in other eyes, and you have read the
life of the man when you have divined what it is. Let the thing
serve as a figure. So ought alert interest in the world of men
and thought to serve each one of us that we shall have the quick
perceiving vision, taking meanings at a glance, reading
suggestions as if they were expositions. You shall not otherwise
get full value of your humanity. What good shall it do you else
that the long generations of men which have gone before have
filled the world with great store of everything that may make you
wise and your life various? Will you not take the usury of the
past, if it may be had for the taking? Here is the world humanity
has made: will you take full citizenship in it, or will you live
in it as dull, as slow to receive, as unenfranchised, as the