If the mind be now awakened to a manly independence, and start on a course of vigorous self culture, all will be well. But if on the other hand, it sinks into a state of inaction, indifferent to its own needs and to all the highest ends and aims of life, then woe to the man. For very few ever rouse themselves in mid-life, to a new intellectual taste or to an untried application of their time and powers to that culture for which the Creator formed and endowed them. Life is neither a tragedy nor a farce. Men are not all either knaves or heroes.
Women are neither angels nor furies.
And yet if you depended upon much of the literature of the day, you would get the idea that life, instead of being something earnest, something practical is a fitful and fantastic and extravagant thing. The man will be looking all day long for his heroine in the tin shop, by the forge, in the factory, in the counting-room and he will not find her. He will be dissatisfied. A man who gives himself up to the indiscriminate reading of novels will be nerveless, inane, and a nuisance. He will be fit neither for the store, nor for the shop, nor the field.