The lessons are individual, and brevity must be one of their chief characteristics. Dante gives excellent advice to teachers when he says, “Let thy words be counted.” The more carefully we cut away useless words, the more perfect will become the lesson. (1) And in preparing the lessons which she is to give, the teacher must pay special attention to this point, counting and weighing the value of the words which to speak.

Another characteristic quality of the lesson in the "Children's Houses" is its simplicity. It must be (2) obtained of all that is not absolute truth. That the teacher must not lose herself in vain words, is included in the first quality of (3) conciseness; the second, then, is closely related to the first: that is, the carefully of quality of chosen words must be the most simple it is possible to find, and must refer to the truth. The third quality of the lesson is its objectivity. 

(4) Objectivity, opposite to subjectivity, remains essential when planning a lesson. 

There shall remain in evidence only the object to which she wishes to call the attention of the child. This brief and simple lesson must be considered by the teacher as an explanation of the object and of the use which the child can make of it.

(5) 1. In the giving of such lessons the fundamental guide must be the method of observation, in which is included and understood the liberty of the child. 2. And she must take great care not to offend the principles of liberty. 3. For, if she (6) has provoken the child to make an unnatural effort, she will no longer know what is the spontaneous activity of the child. If, therefore, the lesson rigourously prepared in this brevity, simplicity, and truth is not understood by the child, is not accepted by him as an explanation of the object. The teacher must be warned of two things: first, not to insist by repeating the (7) lesson; and second, not to make the child feel that he has made a mistake, or that he is not understood. In doing so she will cause him to make an effort to understand, and will thus alter the natural state which must be used by her in making her psychological observation. A few examples may serve to illustrate this point.

Let us suppose, for example, that the teacher (8) thinks to teach a child the two colours, red and blue. She desires (9) to attracting the attention of the child to the object. She says, therefore, "Look at this." Then, in order to teach the colours, she says, showing the red, "This is red," raising her voice a little and pronouncing the word  "red" slowly and clearly; then showing him the other colour, "This is blue." (10) Losing track that the child has  understood, she says to him, "Give me the red,"—"Give me the blue." Let us suppose that the child in following this last direction makes a mistake. The teacher does not repeat and does not insist; (11) she smiles, gives the child a friendly caress and takes away the colours.

Music deals first of all with feeling or emotion. But since emotion may be guided by the mind and transfused by the imagination (12) since emotion is not a separate and isolated part of our being—so music may be so ordered by the mind and so transfused by the imagination as to become intellectual and imaginative. It is true that the greater part of the music produced and performed deals only with emotion, but this is equally true of literature. The popular novel is one tenth emotion, one tenth mind, and the rest imagination. (13) Moreover, it is with music, though such illogical invention as one constantly finds in  many popular novels would be intolerable in any music. Since there seems to be an incongruity between the statement that music has no definite.meaning and the statement that it is intellectual, (14) this leaves no room for reconciliation.

(15) We must first of all distinguish between the quality itself and the expression of the quality. A person may have a mind stored with wisdom and be completely what we call “intellectual,” without ever expressing himself by a spoken or written word. His wisdom exists by itself and for itself, entirely separated from (16) their expression. If he expresses himself, and with skill, we call that expression  literature, but, in any case, it remains wisdom. And what is wisdom? It is what Mr. Eliot describes a liberal education to be— “a state of mind:“a state of mind:” it is the fusion of (17) knowledge with experience, with feeling and imagination.

Now words are symbols which (18) diminish in their efficacy as they try to compass feeling and imagination. If the wise man is cold, he can say, “I am cold:” but if he wishes to tell you of his idea of God, he has no words adequate for the purpose, because  he is dealing with something which is not in the domain of knowledge alone—which he can feel, or perhaps imagine, but cannot define. The reason alone never even touches the far-away circle of that perfection which we believe to exist, and the subtle inner relations between man and the visible and invisible world refuse to be harnessed to language. For these he finds expression in some form of beauty. (19) “The beautiful,” says Goethe, “is a manifestation of the secret laws of nature which, but for this appearance, had been forever concealed from us.”

So we say that in wisdom the qualities we call insight, feeling, and imagination must find for themselves some more plastic medium of expression than language. And when the plastic medium, though  non-definitive, has those qualities of (20) subjectivity, continuity, and form which are essential to all intellectual expression, we are justified in calling it “intellectual.” Let us take for our specific illustration the first movement of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven. It is impossible to imagine this as an expression of feeling only, untouched by thought or by imagination. The inevitable conclusion arrived at by any person (21) who’s understands it is that the feeling is absolutely controlled by the mind, and that it is imagination that gives it its extraordinary effect. (22)

We have seen how the Portuguese had slowly coasted along the shore of Africa during the fifteenth century in search of a way to the Indies. By the end of the century, mariners portulanos gave a rude yet (23) effective account of the littoral of Africa, both on the west and the eastern side. Not only did they explore the coast, but they settled upon (24) it, at Amina on the Guinea coast, at Loando near the Congo, and at Benguela on the western coast, they established stations from whence to despatch the gold and ivory, and, above all, the slaves, which turned out to be the chief African products of use to Europeans. On the east coast they settled at Sofala, a port of Mozambique; and in Zanzibar they possessed no less than three ports: those first visited by Vasco da Gama and (25) afterwards celebrated by Milton in the sonorous line contained in the gorgeous geographical excursus in the Eleventh Book—

"Mombaza    and    Quiloa    and    Melind."

—Paradise Lost, xi. 339.

1. It is probable that, besides settling on the coast, the Portuguese from time to time made explorations into the interior. 2. At any rate, in some maps of the sixteenth and (26) 17th century there is shown a remarkable knowledge of the course of the Nile. 3. (27) We, which can be scarcely other than the Victoria, Albert Nyanza, and Tanganyika, see it terminated in three large lakes. 4. The Mountains of the Moon also figure prominently, and it was only almost the other day that Mr. Stanley re-discovered them.

(28) 5. It is difficult, however, to determine how far these entries on the Portuguese maps were due to actual knowledge or report, or to the traditions of a still earlier knowledge of these lakes and mountains; for in the maps accompanying the early editions of Ptolemy we likewise obtain the same information, which is repeated by the Arabic geographers, obviously from Ptolemy, and not from actual observation. 6. When the two great French cartographers Delisle and D'Anville determined not to insert anything on their maps for which they had not some evidence, these lakes and mountains disappeared, and thus it has come about that maps of the seventeenth century often appear to display more knowledge of the interior of Africa than those of the beginning of the nineteenth, at least (29) with regard to the sources of the Nile.

African exploration of the interior begins with the search for the sources of the Nile, and has been mainly concluded by the determination of the course of the three other great rivers, the Niger, the Zambesi, and the Congo. It is remarkable that all four rivers (30) has had their course determined by persons of British nationality. The names of Bruce and Grant will always be associated with the Nile, that of Mungo Park with the Niger, Dr. Livingstone with the Zambesi, and Mr. Stanley with the Congo. It is not inappropriate that, (31) accept in the case of the Congo, England should control the course of the rivers (32) (which her sons first made accessible to civilization).

We have seen that there was an ancient tradition reported by Herodotus, that the Nile trended off to the west and became there the river Niger; while still earlier there was an impression that part of it at any rate wandered eastward, and some way joined on to the same source as the Tigris and Euphrates—at least that seems to be the (33) suggestion.

As we stood at the mouth of the low entrance, making final preparations for a plunge into the darkness, I perceived a strong cold current blowing out from the cave—sufficiently strong and cold to render knickerbocker stockings a very unavailing protection. (34) While engaged in the discovery that this style of dress is not without its drawbacks, I found, to my surprise, that the direction of the current suddenly changed, and the cold blast which had before blown out of the cave, now blew almost as strongly in. The arch of entrance was so low, that the top was about on a level with my waist; so that our faces and the upper parts of our bodies were not exposed to the current, and the strangeness of the effect was thus considerably increased.

As a matter of curiosity, we lighted a (35) bougie, and placed (36) it on the edge of the snow, at the top of the slope of 3 or 4 feet which led down the surface of the ice, and then stood to watch the effect of the current on the flame. (37) The experiment proved that the currents alternated, and, as I fancied, regularly; and in order to determine, if possible, the law of this alternation, I observed with my watch the exact duration of each current. For twenty-two seconds the flame of the bougie was blown away from the entrance, so strongly as to assume a horizontal position, and almost to leave the wick: then the current ceased, and the flame rose with a stately air to a vertical position, moving down again steadily till it became once more horizontal, but now pointing in towards the cave. This change occupied in all four seconds; and the current inwards lasted--like the outward current--twenty-two seconds, and then the whole phenomenon was repeated. The currents kept such good time, that when I stood beyond their reach, and turned my back, I was enabled to announce each change with perfect precision. On one occasion, the flame performed its semicircle in a horizontal instead of a vertical plane, moving round the wick in the shape of a pea-flower. The day was very still, so that no external winds could have anything to do with this singular alternation; and, indeed, the pit was so completely sheltered by its shape, that a storm might have raged outside without producing any perceptible effect below like (38) the terrorization of a murder of crows. It would be difficult to explain the regularity of these opposite currents, (39) since it is not so difficult to see that some such (40) oscillation might be expected. It will be better, however, to defer any suggestions on this point till the glacière has been more fully described.

(41) As our eyes became accustomed to the darkness, we saw (42) someone, an indistinct light, streaming into the cave from some low point at a considerable distance, apparently on a level with the floor; and this we afterwards found to be the bottom of the larger of the two pits we had already (43) fathomed, pit A of the diagram; and we eventually discovered a similar but much smaller communication with the bottom of (44) pit B. In each of these pits there was a considerable pyramid of snow, whose base was on a level with the floor of the glacière: the connecting archway in the case of pit A was 3 or 4 feet high, allowing us to pass into the pit and round the pyramid with perfect ease, while that leading to pit B was less than a foot high, so that no passage could be forced.