Happiness, or the Angel's Lily, blooms in learning where a man may know too little or a man may know too much. There comes to me tonight the figure of Ruskin, that great writer on art and music, that wonderful English composer who wrote the ''Stones of Venice," a book that will live with increasing fascination as the ages go on. I was in England as a correspondent, and I went to see him; I heard that he was not well, not himself, and when I stepped up to the cottage there at the English lakes where he had gone for his health, he was in charge of an attendant nurse. When I put my hand on the gate and asked if I could see Mr. Ruskin, the nurse came and said, "He would not know you, but," he said, "you may speak to him if you have traveled so far to do it; I do not think it would do him any harm." I spoke to him and found his mind wandering on something that had occurred years and years before. Poor, weak man, broken in mind, he had studied too hard, he had learned too much, he had gone beyond the Angel's Lily even in learning.
And it is possible for men to study so hard and so long as to make grave mistakes as to the truths of life, because of their overstudy. There is such a thing as being such a scholar as to be terribly ignorant.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was another one who was great during his middle life, and in that period he expressed great philosophic ideas. But his conversation at last became nothing but frivolous expressions of disconnected language. When at the funeral of Mr. Longfellow we were passing the coffin at Cambridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson was led along by one of his family; and as he looked into the coffin of Mr. Longfellow, who had been one of the most intimate friends he ever had, he shook his head and said, "It seems to me I have seen that face somewhere before," and the magazines and newspapers of that day spoke of the pathetic thing, that this great man with that wonderful mind should have so broken down as to be almost silly in his intercourse with other people. Overdone, overlearned, gone beyond the Angel's Lily.