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A people than studies its own past, and rejoices in the nation's proud memories, is likely to be a patriotic people, the bulwark of law, and the courageous champion of right in the hour of need. - [Nation] In the life of a nation ideas are not the only things of value. Sentiment also is of great value; and the way to foster sentiment in a people, and to develop it in the young, is to have a well-recorded past, and to be familiar with it. - [Nation] The Christian cemetery is a memorial and a record. It is not a mere field in which the dead are stowed away unknown; it is a touching and beautiful history, written in family burial plots, in mounded graves, in sculptured and inscribed monuments. It tells the story of the past, not of its institutions, or its wars, or its ideas, but of its individual lives,--of its men and women and children, and of its household. It is silent, but eloquent; it is common, but it is unique. We find no such history elsewhere; there are no records in all the wide world in which we can discover so much that is suggestive, so much that is pathetic and impressive. - [Cemeteries] There is nothing more nearly permanent in human life than a well-established custom. - [Custom] There is nothing that solidifies and strengthens a nation like reading of the nation's own history, whether that history is recorded in books, or embodied in customs, institutions, and monuments. - [History] To the highest culture, evenness of development, resulting in roundness and symmetry, is essential. The ideal man possesses, in addition to all his other qualities, that quality which is figured in the bloom of the flowering plant, in the fragrance of blossoms, in the blush and flavor of fruit--a quality which cannot be counterfeited any more than you can counterfeit a flower's perfume, which cannot be hidden any more than you can hide the fragrance of an orchard in May. It is the precious flavor of the ripened man. As the full fragrance of the apple, as the velvety cheek of the peach, comes only when the fruit has reached its highest development, so this quality comes only as the result of that wise self-enlargement, that deliberate catholicity, that cultivated charity of opinion, which characterizes the man of culture. - [Culture]
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