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Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! : Helps for Girls, in School and Out by Annie H Ryder
page 52 of 126 (41%)
Fenelon, and Moliere! How much philosophy they will read from Darwin,
Spencer, Huxley! How they will trace the stars in the heavens, and
the marks of God's fingers on the rocks and sands! How they will
separate into their parts water and air, plants and animals! How they
will haunt the libraries, museums, laboratories, and lecture-rooms!--all
when they get out of school.

Oh, my dear girls, you will not do any of these things unless you have
much leisure, and an eager thirst for knowledge. Some new fascination--
society and pleasures--or special duties and pressing occupations will
drive the fervid desires of your school-days quite from your hearts,
or make it impossible for you to gratify them. At any rate, in
attempting to pursue all these studies, you will find that neither the
ordinary length of life, nor the average brain, will be sufficient for
the work. Your lists of books, like your lists of intentions, will serve
only to fill the waste-paper baskets.

But now let us see what you can do, girls, if you will. Almost every
one of you spends a few hours a week in reading, and some of you pour
away "oceans of time" over fashionable fiction. Why not give just two
or three little hours to study,--study so pleasant and so arranged
that you may call it reading, or recreating, or getting acquainted
with "the best of all good company"? After a while you will find these
hours precious and necessary. They will give you rest, and a greater
number of useful and pleasant subjects to think about; they will afford
you broader and readier information; and they will deepen within you
an interest in the highest and most helpful things this life affords.

What we get in the average school is largely rudimentary knowledge,
the object of which is to create a love for more knowledge, to bend
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