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 I
was 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, I
received 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.
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