"God has set over man many tutors and governors, uncertificated indeed, but supremely efficient, and if man does not lend a willing ear to them and a heart to their discipline, he may reach distinction as a marvel of academical success, but he is not educated. Wordsworth gives us the clue to this larger education in the lines from 'Brougham Castle'
The Fairy Way Margaret Tarrant
Spring Gaiety Margaret Tarrant
'His daily teachers had been woods and rills, The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills.'
These in their songs and in their silences first take in hand the child. These give him the hearing ear, the seeing eye, the large horizon of solitude, and the quiet of mind which must underlie all true greatness of thought and action.
There is something wanting in education where a child has not had its share of this teaching, and the heat and stress of human life has been round it from the beginning, never leaving it the leisure to be rapt in silence and alone. However full of activity life may be, when pressing duties crowd upon us, something beyond is needed to make it perfect, some halls of space and avenues of leisure in the soul; some stately distances of manner and high porticoes of silence;
The Willow Dance Margaret Tarrant
some long reverent approaches to the interior mansion where God and His angels condescend to walk. These are inherited from the early, silent, leisurely years the woods and rills of the poem." (1870 "Family and Childhood" Life and Letters of Janet Erskine Stuart, Superior General if the Society of the Sacred Heart: 1857-1914 Maud Monahan).
Flowers for Mary Margaret Tarrant