“Only a life of barren pain
Wet with sorrowful tears for rain;
Warmed sometimes by a wandering gleam
Of joy that seemed but a happy dream.
A life as common and brown and bare
As the box of earth in the window there;
Yet it bore at last the precious bloom
Of a perfect soul in a narrow room–
Pure as the snowy leaves that fold
Over the flower’s heart of gold.”
We must pay the full price for all we get in the market of life. There are no auctions and bargain tables where things of real value are sold for a trifle. Of course there are cheap things offered, things sometimes, too, which seem to be very valuable; but those who buy them discover sooner or later that they are only tinsel, tawdry things, whose brightness is gone in a moment, and that in taking them, even at so cheap a rate, they have been sadly cheated. We cannot buy real diamonds for a mere song; we must pay their full value to get them. That which costs nothing is worth nothing.
It is so in education. Not infrequently do we see advertisements of quick methods of reaching high attainments – a language, or a science, or an art, in twelve lessons. But only the foolish and indolent are lured to believe in such royal roads to anything worth while.
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