Its Principal--I wonder now that I could have lived so near her for a year without becoming acquainted with her,--but her high local reputation as an intellectual woman inspired me with awe,and I was foolishly diffident.One day,however,upon the persuasion of my friends at Vine Lodge,who knew my wishes for a higher education,I went with them to call upon her.We talked about the matter which had been in my thoughts so long,and she gave me not only a cordial but an urgent invitation to come and enroll myself as a student.There were arrangements for those who could not incur the current expenses,to meet them by doing part of the domestic work,and of these I gladly availed myself.The stately limestone edifice,standing in the midst of an original growth of forest-trees,two or three miles from the Mississippi River,became my home --my student-home--for three years.The benefits of those three years I have been reaping ever since,Itrust not altogether selfishly.It was always my desire and my ambition as a teacher,to help my pupils as my teachers had helped me.
The course of study at Monticello Seminary was the broadest,the most college-like,that I have ever known;and I have had experience since in several institutions of the kind.The study of mediaeval and modern history,and of the history of modern philosophy,especially,opened new vistas to me.In these our Principal was also our teacher,and her method was to show us the tendencies of thought,to put our minds into the great current of human affairs,leaving us to collect details as we could,then or afterward.We came thus to feel that these were life-long studies,as indeed they are.
The course was somewhat elective,but her advice to me was,not to omit anything because I did not like it.I had a natural distaste for mathematics,and my recollections of my struggles with trigonometry and conic sections are not altogether those of a conquering heroine.But my teacher told me that my mind had need of just that exact sort of discipline,and I think she was right.
A habit of indiscriminate,unsystematized reading,such as I had fallen into,is entirely foreign to the scholarly habit of mind.
Attention is the secret of real acquirement;but it was months before I could command my own attention,even when I was interested in the subject I was examining.It seemed as if all the pages of all the books I had ever read were turning themselves over between me and this one page that I wanted to understand.I found that mere reading does not by any means make a student.
It was more to me to come into communication with my wise teacher as a friend than even to receive the wisdom she had to impart.
She was dignified and reticent,but beneath her reserve,as is often the case,was a sealed fountain of sympathy,which one who had the key could easily unlock.Thinking of her nobleness of character,her piety,her learning,her power,and her sweetness,it seems to me as if I had once had a Christian Zenobia or Hypatia for my teacher.
We speak with awed tenderness of our unseen guardian angels,but have we not all had our guiding angels,who came to us in visible form,and,recognized or unknown,kept beside us on our difficult path until they had done for us all they could?It seems to me as if one had succeeded another by my side all through the years,--always some one whose influence made my heart stronger and my way clearer;though sometimes it has been only a little child that came and laid its hand into my hand as if I were its guide,instead of its being mine.
My dear and honored Lady-Principal was surely one of my strong guiding angels,sent to meet me as I went to meet her upon my life-road,just at the point where I most needed her.For the one great thing she gave her pupils,--scope,often quite left out of woman's education,--I especially thank her.The true education is to go on forever.But how can there be any hopeful going on without outlook?And having an infinite outlook,how can progress ever cease?It was worth while for me to go to those Western prairies,if only for the broader mental view that opened upon me in my pupilage there.
During my first year at the seminary I was appointed teacher of the Preparatory Department,--a separate school of thirty or forty girls,--with the opportunity to go on with my studies at the same time.It was a little hard,but I was very glad to do it,as Iwas unwilling to receive an education without rendering an equivalent,and I did not wish to incur a debt.
I believe that the postponement of these maturer studies to my early womanhood,after I had worked and taught,was a benefit to me.I had found out some of my special ignorances,what the things were which I most needed to know.I had learned that the book-knowledge I so much craved was not itself education,was not even culture,but only a help,an adjunct to both.As I studied more earnestly,I cared for fewer books,but those few made themselves indispensable.It still seems to me that in the Lowell mills,and in my log-cabin schoolhouse on the Western prairies,Ireceived the best part of my early education.
The great advantage of a seminary course to me was that under my broad-minded Principal I learned what education really is:the penetrating deeper and rising higher into life,as well as making continually wider explorations;the rounding of the whole human being out of its nebulous elements into form,as planets and suns are rounded,until they give out safe and steady light.This makes the process an infinite one,not possible to be completed at any school.
